Leaving On a Jet Plane

Labour’s Video Nasties

Last week, the White House posted what it called an ASMR video showing undocumented immigrants in chains being led onto planes. This spectacle - and no one will be at all surprised by this, provoked much hilarity from the world’s richest man, who commented on X: ‘Ha ha. Wow ‘.

For those who don’t know, ASMR stands for ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’ - a term used to describe the ‘brain massage’, ‘tingles’, pleasurable sensations, or sense of deep relaxation that some viewers supposedly experience watching certain YouTube videos.

I’m not one of those viewers, and I can’t see the attraction in the sound of stirring soup, whispering or crinkling wrapping paper. The White House deportation video has only clanking chains and jet engines to accompany the deportation of a faceless immigrant - a combination which, it jokingly suggests, will have the same pleasurable effect on a certain kind of viewer.

Sadly, they’re probably right, because in these depraved times there are many Americans who are likely to be entertained and perhaps soothed to see men and women who, as far as they are concerned, are criminal intruders rather than humans with any resemblance to their esteemed selves.

But it’s not only the government of United States of Dystopia that is tossing these shameful spectacles out to the masses. Over the last two weeks, the UK Home Office has been posting its own videos of immigrant deportations and raids, and handcuffed migrants being led onto planes.

Unlike Trump, Labour isn’t presenting these clips as entertainment. On the contrary, they are are intended to demonstrate the Labour government’s serious resolve to control ‘our borders’ - 19,000 deportations so far! Go us! - the better to fend off the political threat from Reform. Despite the difference in tone however, both the Trump and Cooper deportation videos are essentially a form of political theatre, intended to assuage public ‘concerns’ about immigration, while also seeking to win kudos for both governments through demonstrations of performative toughness.

It’s dirty work, that comes naturally to a white supremacist president who came to power through some of the most brazenly racist language that any presidential contender has ever used to describe immigrants. In the UK, these video nasties are the work of a weak and increasingly rudderless government that use the more bureaucratic language of border enforcement to boast of its deportation achievements.

Some of the thinking behind these developments can be found in Keir Starmer’s ‘secret letter’ to his cabinet, that was leaked to the Sunday Times (paywalled} last week. In it Starmer told his ministers that:

Increasingly, politics is no longer built around a traditional left-right axis. It is instead being reimagined around a disruptor-disrupted axis. If governments are not changing the system in favour of working people, then voters will find someone else who does.

Inevitably, Starmer cited Labour’s attitude to immigration as an example of the party’s unwillingness to change the system:

Pure economic migration was confused with genuine concern for those fleeing persecution. We ended up treating all immigration as an untrammelled good. Somehow, politics ended up being too scared to say what is obvious — that some people are genuine refugees and some aren’t; that people coming here to work can be a positive, but that an island nation needs to control its borders.

It’s difficult to avoid the stale odor of Blue Labour exuding from this depressing, and artfully-timed leak, which is clearly aimed at a very particular type of voter. The ‘disruptor-disrupted’ trope is a startlingly shallow and politically-inane explanation for the rise of far-right and ethnonationalist politics, in the UK or anywhere else. The promise to ‘change the system’ is rich coming from a government that does not have the slightest interest in changing the system, and is clearly scared stiff of being seen to want to do that.

Then there is the lazy willingness to accept the ‘fake refugee’ cliché, without any analysis of the convergence between ‘pure’ economic persecution and those ‘fleeing persecution’. And finally, the strawman argument that ‘we’ treated ‘all immigration as an untrammelled good.’

Whoever that ‘we’ is, it hasn’t been the Labour Party. During the Blair/Brown years successive Labour governments whittered on about ‘social cohesion’ as the antidote to race riots and terrorism, and the public’s ‘concerns’ about immigration. At the same time, Labour allowed Accession 8 migrant workers to enter the country under EU rules in unexpectedly large numbers.

Nothing wrong with that. Most of these workers filled essential shortages. They paid taxes. They sent money back home which helped the communities they came from. Nevertheless the rightwing press - with an injection of UKIP rocket fuel - attacked Labour mercilessly for bringing Poles and Bulgarians to the pristine shores of Olde Englande.

At no point did Labour make the positive case for these migratory arrangements, or the (reciprocal) free movement rules that made them possible. Neither Blair nor Brown ever said that this was a mutually-beneficial process for both the ‘host country’ and the men and women who came to live and work here. At no time, did any Labour politician - at least that I can remember - openly recognise the value that immigration brought to British society, the way that Pedro Sánchez for example, is now doing in Spain.

It’s impossible to imagine a Labour government doing this. Rather than challenge xenophobic and evidence-free rhetoric about EU ‘health tourists’ and refugee ‘scroungers’ the Blair/Brown governments boasted of their ability to deport and detain undocumented migrants, just as Starmer’s government is doing now.

This was followed by Ed Miliband’s pathetic ‘Immigration Controls’ mugs, which did him no favours and didn’t deserve to. And now, back in power, Labour continues to allow itself to be dragged rightwards on immigration, and continues to present deportations as a means of out-touching the likes of Farage and Badenoch.

Today, the UK is suffering from multiple, self-inflicted wounds, all of which emanate, in part, from its obsession with immigration. It has cut itself off from its main trading partner. It lacks NHS and social care personnel. Its higher education system - once of the best in the world - is crumbling financially, in part because of its stringent visa rules on foreign students.

It doesn’t have enough construction workers to carry out Labour’s much-vaunted housebuilding program, and it will not be able to get them without immigration. It doesn’t have EU workers to pick fruit, and so it has begun to bring in workers on even more restrictive contracts, which undermine their rights and their bargaining power.

This is not going to bother the Conservatives or Reform, but it ought to concern a nominally social democratic party that pays lip service to workers and working people. Labour’s deportation videos might get a few Sun headlines:

But it will never satisfy voters who vote for men like this:

Rupert needn’t worry, because Labour is already doing ‘Trump-style deportations’. Whether these spectacles will benefit Labour politically remains to be seen, but performative cruelty has nothing to do with ‘disruption.’ And Labour’s video nasties are merely another turn of the immigration doom loop in which this ‘small island’ appears perpetually trapped, and which has toxified its politics for too many dismal years.