We are on the brink of a new era, if only…

So, 2023 turned out not to be the year when British democracy was renewed. It will not be renewed in 2024 either, or any time soon, for that matter. If you want to feel optimistic about something, you had better look elsewhere. Britain’s Eurovision chances look promising this year…

While much of the world celebrated the end of a year that will be remembered chiefly for its unflinching child-killing brutality and the West’s equally unflinching complicity in it, the British government was putting the finishing touches on its latest clever policy announcement.

From 1 January 2024, the Prime Minister tweeted on New Year’s Day, most foreign students studying in Britain would be unable to bring family members to the UK. ‘In 2024, we’re already delivering for the British people’, Mr Sunak boasted of his latest attempt to appeal to British ethnic nationalists and appease party funders with a vested interest in Britain’s decline (Russia’s influence on the 2016 Brexit vote remains uninvestigated despite Putin celebrating it as a major foreign policy success and millions of pounds of Russian money passing into the hands of the Conservative Party and its politicians).

Leaving aside the obvious cruelty of the policy (another vote winner!), this is another excellent example of a purely performative policy that benefits no-one and stands to seriously disadvantage the British economy and its universities, many of which depend on their income from foreign students. In fact, around a fifth of British universities’ total income comes from overseas students who make a net contribution to the UK economy in excess of 40 billion. Losing even a fraction of this income could put some institutions in a precarious position.

Sunak and his government know this, of course. But they either don’t care or do not expect the policy to be fully or properly implemented. The point, as ever, is not to address the real problems Britain faces but, rather, to stir the pot, provoking nationalistic fervour among their party’s increasingly rabid core supporters while fanning the dying embers of Brexit in the hope that something will catch on fire. Anything that stokes division and discord is good, right? There’s an election coming up, after all.

Fortunately, for international students, other countries are available. The British aren’t so fortunate, at least not since the Tories ended freedom of movement (Huzzah!).

This sort of performative politics is nothing new, of course, but I do think that, by now, we should be better at spotting it and calling it out. So much media attention is given to exploring purely performative policies and giving them credence in the minds of a public that should know better.

The government’s policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda is another case in point. This is the government’s de facto flagship policy. It is the one to which ministers have given most attention and the one to which the Prime Minister most often addresses his remarks. It is important, they say, to cut migration (even if it means treating asylum seekers as illegals). It is a priority of the people (in fact, only a third of British people polled support it, predominantly Conservative supporters). Yet it is a wholly impractical and, frankly, horribly cruel policy that is, in the end, obviously and unalterably unworkable. It also has little or nothing to do with any real-world challenge that Britian as a country faces.

Who would have thought that a plan to deport thousands of asylum seekers to a country with a sub-optimal infrastructure and a dodgy human-rights record some 4,000 miles away would be impractical or face legal challenge? The government certainly did. On the basis of Rwanda’s current undertaking to accommodate 200 migrants per year it would take the country 165 years to absorb the 33,000 refugees currently scheduled for deportation by the Home Office. But, of course, the policy was never really meant to work, and the scorn poured on it by critics is just grist to the government’s mill.

The point of the policy is not to ‘stop the boats’ or reduce migration numbers, but to create division, to start fires, because that is what consolidates the Conservative vote and keeps the party viable as a mainstream political proposition. From the government’s perspective, the Rwanda policy has already been a stonking success. It has provoked criticism from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who raised concerns about the ‘externalisation’ of asylum obligations and the consequent risks to refugees, and from Human Rights Watch, which has said that Rwanda should not be considered a safe third country given ongoing human rights violations. Most recently, the British Supreme Court ruled the Conservatives’ plan unlawful because of the risk of harm to asylum seekers, prompting the government to introduce new legislation declaring Rwanda safe in order to circumvent the ruling. Leaving aside the obvious absurdity of legislating a country ‘safe’, all of this serves the government’s larger objective of fuelling opposition to ‘meddling’ international courts and human rights law. The government has already indicated its willingness to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. All for a policy that everyone knows will not work.

But, of course, it doesn’t really matter if a policy never comes fully to fruition. The government can always pretend that it has. Just this week, Home Secretary James Cleverly claimed falsely (lied, in old speak) that the UK asylum backlog had been cleared, in line with a long-standing policy promise, despite the government’s own figures showing that 98,599 applicants (a third of them eligible for deportation to Rwanda) remain in the asylum system awaiting an initial decision on whether their claims are admissible (more than at the time the promise was made). The government claimed that its pledge concerned only ‘legacy’ cases (people who arrived before 2022) but its own figures show there are more than 4,500 cases even in that backlog still awaiting initial decision. Why worry about the failure of a policy when you can simply pretend that it has worked?

So, if the policies aren’t real, what is it that Conservatives actually do in government?

Well, other than ‘taking the tough decisions’, pursuing the ‘people’s priorities’ and being ‘a safe pair of hands’, the answer seems to be, in the main, enriching their friends and themselves while deepening the impoverishment of working-class people. It does not seem inappropriate to describe this as ‘class war’. Wealth has been funnelled to the super rich on an unprecedented scale, with the rest of us having to make do with a smaller and smaller share of national wealth. It’s hard to believe that before Thatcher gained power in 1979 Britain was one of the most equal countries in the world. Now it is among the most unequal in the developed world.

While Conservative austerity has crippled public services and left the National Health Service in a state of permanent crisis, turbo-charging child poverty and levelling down life expectancy for the poorest, the wealthiest have had a bonanza. Between 2020 and 2022 alone, when the COVID-19 crisis was at its height and the police were kicking in doors and breaking up children’s parties, billionaire wealth increased by almost £150 billion. In 2023, according to the Equality Trust, the richest 50 families in the UK held more wealth than half of the UK population, comprising 33.5 million people. If the wealth of the super-rich continues to grow at the rate it has been, the Trust says, by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200 families will be larger than the whole UK GDP. At the same time, Britain has seen the longest period of wage stagnation since the Napoleonic Wars.

And while ordinary people adjusted their behaviour for the greater good and kept essential services ticking over during the pandemic crisis, the government waived procurement rules so they could funnel yet more public cash to the already wealthy. The smell of public money prompted a feeding frenzy among the rich, and especially those with an existing link to the ruling party. VIP lanes were created for the supply of urgently needed protective equipment and companies set up five minutes ago with no office or staff were preferred to companies with years of experience. Exorbitant quotes with staggering profit margins were readily accepted. Much of the equipment supplied turned out to be unusable. Transparency International UK found that a fifth of government COVID-19 contracts triggered red flags indicating possible corruption. A New York Times investigation of 1,200 UK government COVID-19 contracts – worth a total of $22 billion – found that around half went to companies run by friends and associates of Conservative politicians, or with no experience in that area. Many of these ‘friends and associates’ became very rich. Luxury yachts were bought. Offshore trusts were created. The money disappeared. Lawyers were instructed. No one was arrested. No one is ever arrested.

This is very serious stuff. Corruption at the top. No government could survive this, you would think. But this is Britain, where the people who own the country also get to run it (stick around long enough and you will get a go) and do not have to answer to anyone, even the law. Things just carried on. Power passed to a new, unelected and entirely unqualified Prime Minister. Then to another. Memoirs were written. The Queen died. A new King was installed. Flags were waved. The national anthem was sung. Knees were bent. Cronies were honoured. Chums were appointed. The absurd circus continued.

Britain remains undemocratic at its core, and this is how the ruling party likes it. Parliament’s unelected second chamber is now stuffed with donors, political favourites, media cronies and crooked politicians. Legitimised corruption, the New York Times called it, quite properly. It was no less democratic, and I dare say a good deal less corrupt, when its was exclusively populated with hereditary peers. The House of Lords is one of the pillars of Conservative Britain. A second might be said to be the royal family, a beloved national institution that also hoards much of the country’s wealth (the King is one of the country’s biggest landlords), resists taxation and even scoops up the assets of the ordinary dead.

The third is the system of private schools (termed ‘public’ schools in Britain, without a hint of irony – or perhaps the irony is privately savoured, a kind of delicious joke), which ensures that privilege is passed on from generation to generation while state school kids scramble around for a few crumbs from their table. They are the reason our politics and media and every other important institution have come to be dominated by the wealthy and their privileged perspective. That is what they are for. While the income and position of private schools have been protected and strengthened by successive governments, state school funding has been cut, along with pretty much everything else. While the rich get a rounded, liberal education intended to support a happy, flourishing life, and access to elite universities, most of the rest of us are prepared for a joyless life of endless work and debt with no prospect of commutation. We get an education fit for an object, a unit of production, not a human being. We get an education that erodes our sense of self-value and belonging, that makes us distrust ourselves and where we come from, that turns us into things. That is what state school is for.

But, you might say, aren’t these the institutions that make us what we are and made us what we were? Aren’t they the stuff of Britain’s glorious empire, forged on the playing fields of Eton. Well, not really. Maybe for Boris Johnson and his oafish ilk. Certainly not for me. I grew up on different playing fields, without servants or a trust fund, or influential parents able to give me a leg up. I grew up among people who were sharp and funny and defiant and hardworking and deeply sceptical about the legitimacy of any form of authority. I grew up not singing the national anthem or tugging at my forelock or wanting or expecting something for nothing. I grew up in a different Britain. And I miss it.

This is a general election year, of course, at least if the Prime Minister is to be believed (spoiler: see above). A change of government is probable. Labour, led by Keir Starmer, is likely to be in power by the end of the year. But will this result in meaningful change for the British people? Starmer has done his best to dampen expectations, certainly, recognising that the best way to get elected in Britain is to promise to be almost but not quite as bad as the last lot. Few people know what he really stands for, if anything. But, again, the British don’t like conviction politicians, preferring opportunistic, uncharismatic balloons of hot air like David Cameron.

Maybe Starmer is playing a clever game. Maybe he had his fingers crossed when he bent the knee to media vampire Rupert Murdoch and purged the Corbynite left. That hope, I suppose, is what keeps traditional Labour voters and progressives in the party on board. But, very sadly, they are likely to be disappointed. Changing anything in Britain means changing pretty much everything, including the institutions that keep us trapped in the fever dream of a long-disappeared imperial past. I don’t think Starmer has an appetite for that. He is a tinkerer not a reformer. He has not done enough to challenge the narratives of the ruling party, which will, to a extent, tie his hands in office. And while he is likely to foreground a return to ethical politics and a rejection of Johnsonian cynicism and venality, he has provided no evidence of a supporting vision to sustain this. Introducing new codes of conduct won’t be enough to restore trust in politics, nor should it be. It won’t get foreign money out of British politics or end cronyism or corruption or give marginalised people a voice in how things are run.

The Conservatives are the natural party of government in Britain, or in England at least, which, of course, electorally dominates the other countries in the union. They are in power most of the time. They dominate the House of Lords and the newspapers and most of Britain’s key institutions. They are the party of empire, the royal family and Eton and all of that. They control the narrative, even in opposition. They are in power even when they are not. Britain’s archaic electoral system is part of the problem and seriously limits the prospects of progressive politics. The departing party can constrain what any new government can do in office and can just as easily break everything up when they return to office, as the Tories did in 2010, under the cloak of austerity and the financial crisis, which they, with chilling electoral effect, blamed on excessive domestic public spending.

There are good ideas within Labour on social policy and education. But real, lasting change means changing how things are done, and most especially Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, which routinely awards unchecked executive power to a party with a minority of the vote and puts a tiny minority of swing voters at the centre of the national policy debate, while most people are effectively ignored and marginalised. Introducing a system of proportional electoral representation would change this and could be the start of a serious re-examination of the institutions which continue to dominate British politics. It would end Britain’s Punch-and-Judy style of politics and ensure every vote counts equally.

Britain needs more than a change of government, that much is clear. But a new government could initiate the kind of deep-rooted institutional change the country really needs. That demands bravery and boldness, as well as a willingness to govern differently. But it also means envisioning a politics that is not dominated by the grand old parties and embracing a political future in which people not parties have the power. It’s hard to see Starmer or any leader of either of the two main parties legislating for their own eventual obsolescence, even if that is what the country needs.

Roads to serfdom

The Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has been fibbing again. No, not that one. The new one; you know, the self-proclaimed ‘reasonable’ one, fond of taking the difficult decisions, and all that. You’ve probably seen him pretending to fill someone else’s car with petrol or demonstrating his unfamiliarity with paying for things. He wants you to think that decent pay for workers is unaffordable, that the only way to fund public sector pay increases is by putting a further squeeze on the poor. He knows these things are not true. But he would like you to think they are. But don’t worry, it’s all in a good cause: an increasingly unequal, inequitable and authoritarian Britain in which industrial action and public protest are all but illegal. This way to the polling booths, ladies and gentlemen!

The faces may have changed but the modus operandi hasn’t. They are playing different parts but, make no mistake, this is another play from the same dismal repertory company. Lately, it’s felt like the same production over and over again (so many first nights!). Their repertoire is woefully limited and, let’s be honest, we’ve seen most of it before. I mean, the lines don’t even change (who knew ‘The mess we inherited’ would still be popular 12 years in!). I stopped watching them a while ago. I thought that if enough of us ignored them they would just go away, shuffling back to their luxury yachts and heated stables, their pockets stuffed with public cash. Unfortunately, enough journalists and members of the public turn out for each new production to keep them in business. And, like a lot of things that have been around too long, staying in business is what this not especially venerable institution is all about.

Of course, Mr Sunak wants to pit ‘union bosses’ against ‘ordinary families’, as though the strikes were part of a Marxist plot and the people on the picket lines were not themselves ‘ordinary’ people trying to heat their homes and put food on the table. It is typical of the UK’s ruling party to invoke fairness when attempting to defend the chronic and systemic unfairness they wish to perpetuate. We must inflict austerity on the poor so future generations don’t pay the price of our thriftlessness! We must protect private schools because removing their charitable status would make them unaffordable to some ‘hard-working and aspirational’ families and put an intolerable strain on the state system! This is just the latest iteration of a tried and tested formula. You can’t have decent pay because it would mean taxing poor people more. But, of course, in this case, as in the others, the government is not interested in fairness. They like austerity because it is an opportunity to reduce the size of the state and redistribute wealth to the private sector. They like private schools because they perpetuate the educational inequality from which they and their kids benefit. And they are resisting the pay claims of workers because the suppression of wages in the UK benefits the people they work for: the powerful elites that control most of Britain’s wealth, people for whom enough is never enough.

In fact, the government rather likes industrial disputes precisely because they are divisive. They want you to think the strikers are greedy, selfish militants who are all out for themselves and don’t care in the least for the national good. This is what Mr Sunak would prefer you to worry about, not the appalling unfairness, impoverishment and inequality that is driving workers to strike. He wants you to think they are being unreasonable. He is the reasonable one. Don’t they realise the pot is finite? We can’t give everyone everything they want. His job is to minimize the impact of their ill-judged actions on the poorest and most vulnerable. He would prefer not to intervene but, when it comes to protecting lives, well, what would you do? It all seems so, well, reasonable. I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it? But it isn’t reasonable, and neither is Mr Sunak. In fact, he is something of an extremist.

What the Prime Minister would rather you don’t think about is how the current unfair and unequal distribution of wealth in the UK is the result of political choices. There is nothing inevitable about it. The poverty in which many millions of workers and their children now live is the result of deliberate, measured political choices to which Mr Sunak has been party. They have no intention of changing this. ‘Levelling up’ was never more than a slogan (and a misleading one at that). All the false choices set out by ministers are a distraction, intended to convince you that the government really has no choice: public spending had to be cut, wage bills have to be suppressed, the health service has to be privatised (sorry, getting ahead of myself!). Rather than legislating to make things better for working families, the government’s focus is on how to deal with the fall-out of the ideological austerity it has imposed over the past decade or so and that it has no interest in reversing or ameliorating.

The strikes are an opportunity for Mr Sunak to step up plans to extend anti-strike legislation that would prevent or heavily restrict industrial action by emergency service (such as nurses) and infrastructure (such as railway) workers. These plans are part of a worrying descent into authoritarianism in UK politics. The government’s new public order bill includes anti-protest proposals such as banning orders which could result in electronic tagging and monitoring of people who have committed no offence, while Mr Sunak has further promised to give police more powers to tackle ‘disruptive’ (i.e., effective) protests. The government is also considering plans to scrap the Human Rights Act and replace it with a British ‘bill of rights’. Mr Sunak’s own comment on this subject makes it absolutely clear why we need to retain it. ‘We clearly have a problem with human rights law in this country and it is making it difficult for us to achieve our objectives’, he commented during his leadership campaign.

The current wave of strikes, and their outcome, could not be more important. They are not, as the PM disingenuously suggested, a conflict between union bosses and ‘ordinary people’. In fact, they are the expression of frustration and anger – a ‘scream of rage’, as Brian Reade put it – at a society that has run down its public services and artificially suppressed wages for over a decade, while facilitating the enrichment of a small number of super-wealthy, highly privileged people. The dreadful unfairness of this unprecedented redistribution of wealth from the public purse to a few private individuals has gone largely unremarked by the British media, unsurprisingly, I guess, as it is, by and large, owned by members of this relatively small but all-powerful, offshore, tax-avoiding oligarchy. No surprise either that while modest requests by workers for decent pay are met with stark warnings of a wage-price inflationary spiral, the escalating billions paid out in executive salaries and shareholder dividends scarcely draw comment.

But ‘ordinary’ people aren’t stupid, irrespective of what Mr Sunak and his colleagues believe. People recognize injustice and they understand that things are getting worse. Some people are making fortunes while others struggle to meet their basic needs. They see the corruption and how the corrupt emerge scot-free. Whereas, once, disgraced politicians disappeared from public life, or dedicated themselves to public service, as John Profumo reportedly did, now they are free to launder their reputations on reality TV. People can see that power is consolidated in the wrong places, and they know that they have few cards to play – and none that can be played without pain. No-one takes industrial action lightly. It is the last resort. We need to listen to them. They deserve to be taken seriously.

For most of the twentieth century, the gap between rich and poor narrowed. In the aftermath of the Second World War, in particular, people demanded new freedoms, new rights. They expected more and saw the value in what they contributed. There was hope in some quarters that the pandemic might act as a catalyst in a similar way. Our dependence as a society on teachers, postal workers, doctors, nurses, ambulance workers, public transport workers, and so on, was laid bare. Maybe this would prompt us to reshape our society, to value differently and make fairness and equality our goals? The circumstances, however, were very different, and it already feels as though these hopes were in vain and perhaps a little naïve. Covid-19 struck in the midst of a counter-revolution, during which most of the post-war gains achieved by the working class had been successfully rolled back. In the UK, the chief agents of reaction were the Conservative Party, from Thatcher on, though New Labour, of course, also played a significant, though less purposeful, part. They have overseen the mass transfer of public assets and galloping inequality, as the rich become ever richer and the poor watched their communities stagnate, decline and die. But it wasn’t enough simply to give the rich the opportunity to enhance their fortunes. It was important too to reduce the status of everyone else, economically and socially. For decades, the UK has embraced policies that actively disadvantaged the worse off. The rewards for those prepared to dance to the oligarchs’ tune are great, and our politicians have danced merrily while working people’s lives have become progressively worse and hope of positive change has ebbed away.

This is why the current disputes matter so much. Are we content to be poor? Do we accept the hand we are dealt? Are we happy to be lied to and gaslighted, while our basic freedoms – and, in some ways the most important and basic democratic freedom, to protest – are eroded? Do we think it fair that our children’s life prospects are largely determined by the circumstances of their birth? If your answer, to any or all of these questions, is ‘no’, then you already know what is at stake. Defeat for the unions will mean a worsening of conditions, the further impoverishment of workers and our continuing descent into a kind of economic serfdom – the miserable prospect for which recent decades have  prepared us. The future looks grim indeed if we cannot summon the courage to stand up and force a change of course.