Flags, Boats and Borders

The British Road to Barbarism

I never much liked the expression the ‘wrong side of history.’ As much as we might want it to be otherwise, history doesn’t have an intrinsic moral direction leading to the arc of justice or anywhere else. If progress can be made, it can also be undone. Because no matter how enlightened or civilised we think we are, every society contains the potential for barbarism, and when the barbarians appear they may not be wearing leather boots and a black uniform with a death’s head insignia.

Nowadays, they may take the form of a sweaty, fake-tanned rapist felon, spouting lies and gibberish and promising to make you ‘great again’ while his balaclava-clad minions snatch fathers outside their children’s schools or stand grinning for moronic Instagram selfies in front of men in cages.

Or they may stand before you in a suit and tie against the ludicrous and sinister background of a giant flag, proudly announcing their inhuman proposals to deport ‘hundreds and thousands’ of immigrants, while vigilante mobs terrorize asylum seekers in hotels that they never wanted to be in, and daub St George’s flags on roundabouts and pavements in the name of Inger-land.

We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be distracted by discussions about the workability of Farage’s proposals, or the ‘despair’ and ‘legitimate concerns’ that these proposals are supposedly addressing. The men in balaclavas shouting Rule Britannia and hanging flags from lamp posts are expressing hatred, not despair - hatred incited by Farage and his far-right cohorts, with the gleeful assistance of the right-wing press, and some of the grubbiest politicians this country has ever seen.

‘Operation Restoring Justice’ was an attempt to capitalise on the hatred that they have incited. This brutal reduction of men and women seeking asylum to disposable objects who can be dumped anywhere but here, has nothing to do with justice. What Farage is offering, like Enoch Powell’s corpse with a pint and fag in hand, is state-sanctioned barbarism, and the final transformation of the UK into a dystopian pariah that proclaims its nastiness to the world and doesn’t give a damn.

Because make no mistake about it, barbarism is what will be required if this UK Deportation Command’ becomes operational. Barbarism will be the consequence of the UK’s withdrawal from the ECHCR and the Refugee Convention. There are people - too many people - in this country, who do not care: fascistic goons and reality tv stars who will be only too happy to cheer on Farage’s carnival of detention and deportation; pampered Telegraph columnists and Mail rent-a-bigots who think packing refugees off to the Taliban is challenging the ‘elite’; Tory politicians looking to save their party from oblivion by emulating Reform’s brainless savagery; Labour MPs who will say anything, or more likely, say nothing, in order to hold onto their shaky seats.

None of this will make the UK ‘proud, prosperous and powerful’ (again), but it will make it more vicious, more isolated, more shameful, and more arrogantly racist than it already is. Farage’s proposals are not the product of his own depraved imagination. These proposals could have been written in Mar a Lago or the offices of the Heritage Foundation. They are part of an orchestrated attempt by the ethnonationalist right and its billionaire funders to destroy the liberal international order and all the treaties and conventions associated with it, using ‘border sovereignty’ as the battering ram and organising principle.

Farage has promised that the boats will stop as soon as his policies are enacted. There is no evidence at all to suggest that he can do anything of the kind, and no indication of how this leering fascist-in-a-suit plans to persuade other countries to accept the 600,000 immigrants he plans to deport.

But the details don’t matter. The cruelty is the point, and when these policies fail, the cruelty will be cranked up.

‘It’s about whose side you’re on’, Farage brayed last week. This, at least, is true. And a country that aspires to even the most basic norms of morality, legality and decency should not be on the side of the Pied Piper of Clacton and his band of bastards. Asked by an ITV reporter whether the UK should be deporting migrants to dictatorships, war zones or the Taliban, Dubai Dicky - a man you could easily imagine eating popcorn and watching an immigrant drown in a puddle - responded: ‘There are uncomfortable things that happen elsewhere in the world. It is not our job to govern the whole world.’

No it isn’t. But nor is it our job to send people back to countries where they are likely to be killed and tortured. And if this happens, we will be seeing many more ‘uncomfortable things’ in the next few years, right here in the UK. We should not be surprised that this is happening. The seeds have been sown, and re-sown, over many dismal years. Though Reform has succeeded in turning small boat arrivals into a national emergency - the better to reap political rewards from it - the events of this summer are just the latest episode in decades of anti-immigrant ‘take our country back’ rhetoric, in which one group of foreigners has been after another has been described as dangerous and problematic.

None of the three main political parties have seriously challenged this. Very few politicians have even attempted to counter the misinformation and disinformation that constantly surrounds immigration and asylum. On the contrary, every government has responded to public ‘concerns’ with ever-more draconian border policies, to the point when the whole principle of refugee protection is now being called into question.

Labour has been as bad as its predecessors, and in some cases worse. At no point in the government’s response to Farage’s speech, has any Labour minister attacked Reform’s essential premises on moral grounds. All they have done is boast that they can deport and detain more people, do it better, and that they love flags too.

This is the opposite of moral leadership, and Farage’s ICE-style deportations-on-crack are the logical outcome of this collective cowardice.

In allowing the border to become the centre of the national ‘debate’ about undocumented immigration, the entire political class has locked itself into a trajectory that can only lead downwards - to further repression, exclusion, and violations of rights in pursuit of an unacknowledged policy of deterrence that has not succeeded even in its own wretched terms.

The same can be said of the United States, and the European Union. The EU has allowed tens of thousands of men, women and children to drown in the Mediterranean in order to maintain the ‘compensatory’ hard border policies that followed the Schengen agreements. None of this will ever be enough for the likes of Vox, Gert Wilders or the National Rally.

The Obama and Biden administrations were deporting even more people - including children - than Trump has been able to deport - so far. Now, in the US, the mass detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants has become the catalyst for a ruthless fascistic shakedown, which has placed the future of American society in jeopardy.

This is how they roll. And the same outcome is perfectly possible here, in a directionless country that cannot face up to the damage it has inflicted on itself,where council budgets have been so badly cut that even Reform cannot figure out how to cut them any further. In this land without vision, hope or glory, asylum seekers, refugees and foreigners make easy and convenient targets.

Until we have a government prepared to refute the lies and misinformation from which Reform draws its toxic power, the so-called ‘debate’ about immigration will be dominated by the likes of Farage and Jenrick, and this country will continue the collective descent into vigilanteland that we have witnessed this summer.

As in the past, Labour has repeatedly tried to placate the ‘concerns’ of one sector of the public, with harsher and mean-spirited acts of deterrence, while rejecting the concerns of a wider constituency that - in spite of everything - does not view migrants as invaders and criminals, which supports the right to refugee protection, and does not want the country to sink into a racist swamp.

No one should be fooled into thinking that the ‘protesters’ will go home if the hotels close and the boats stop, or that Reform voters will gratefully switch back to Labour. This is a movement that - emboldened by MAGA fascism - feels its time has come, and is gearing up for power.

Put these people in government and, like their mentors in the US, they will find other pseudo-emergencies and other targets, and no community will escape the wrath of the men in balaclavas who are seeking to take ‘their’ country back.

It’s up to the rest of us to do whatever we can to stop this from happening, and become the moral backbone that this pitiful government is sorely lacking.