Sneaking Out

Who do we really care about?

Family, friends, vulnerable people, children...?

Let's start with the children. The most vulnerable children. Kids without parents, living as refugees just across the 'hard border' that separates England from France.

Last year Lord Alf Dubs negotiated an agreement with the UK Government that would allow a number - he had pitched for 3,000 but this was diluted in the final version -  of lone children from the Calais refugee camps to be allowed into the UK.

It was a huge battle for a very small victory.

And then yesterday The Minister for Immigration, Robert Goodwell (Conservative MP for Scarborough and Whitby) shuffled out a written statement declaring that just 150 kids will be allowed into mighty Britain. The statement is designed to baffle with waffle. It is hard to spot just the numbers, but read paragraphs four and five carefully and you'll see the maths. 'We've let in 200, and we are going to let in 150 more.'

Mr Goodwell happened to release his statement on the same day that Westminster voted for the Tories' Hard-Dream Brexit. This is not an accident. He knew that no-one would notice.

This is sneaky politics. In other words, it's business as usual at Westminster.

It uses a technique known as a 'Shock Event.' Professor Heather Cox Richardson has written a clear guide over on Facebook. Brexit is a Shock Event. We are hypnotised by Brexit, we talk about it all the time, and we divide along traditional fault lines over Brexit, with racism or at least anti-immigrant sentiments being the guideline. While we are staring into the darkness of Brexit, the government pushes forward with its real agenda, led by the Minister Against Immigration, Robert Goodwell.

The sneaky Tories have abandoned hundreds of orphan refugees to their fate. One NGO says that it cannot trace one third of the 179 children it was tracking, and Save the Children Fund has reported in its blog that more lone kids are going missing as they hear the rumours about changes in the UK laws. There are 5,100 child refugees and asylum seekers detained in France, according to the well-researched data at the Global Detention Project.


What is to be done? Lobbying, pressure, writing to MPs, donating to the tiny volunteer-led NGOs that are working with child refugees in France. 

But finally the people of Scotland will have to decide. Do we want to be bound to this Parliament of sneaks and rogues, for ever more?




Finally, a selection of organisations you might like to help:

Save the Children Fund
Dunkirk Legal Support Team
Help Refugees
Refugee Youth Service
Calais Migrant Solidarity
Global Detention Project
 
 
 
 
 

 


 

Red Tories

Imagine the scene. It is November, 2020. England has Brexited and immigration controls are in place.

You are the boss of a small software company in Shropshire. Your latest computer game, Zombies on Mars, has gone viral and you urgently need to recruit games animators and developers. No-one in London seems to wants to work in Shropshire, so you plan to recruit people from Spain, Poland and Germany.

These people, post-Brexit, need a visa to work here.

You apply to the new Ministry of Work. They tell you that the 2020 quota for software engineers has now been filled and that you must reapply in January 2021 and 'join the queue.' 

You complain to your Member of Parliament. How can you grow your business if you cannot recruit these people? She replies that it is 'our Government's duty to ensure England's jobs go to English people.'

The Ministry of Work website says that there are still visa places available for;

• Dog Groomers
• Ball boys (tennis courts)
• Polo pony Stable Assistants
• Golf Caddie drivers
• Beaters and Gun-porters for Hunting and Game Estates

If you enjoy golf, polo and shooting, you can employ anyone. But if you want to run a business, you are throttled by the Ministry.

The light starts to dawn. You now live in a planned economy in which a central government body is controlling the flow of the one resource that all businesses need - people. 

The Ministry of Work becomes increasingly powerful, for it dictates how the economy will function. Lobbyists work hard to persuade the Ministry to favour their industry, and senior civil servants are offered sexual services (provided by migrant sex workers) as part of a widening scandal of corruption.

As part of the government's Northern Powerhouse programme, the Ministry of Work announce that unemployed people 'who do not hold British passports' are to be moved to northern England where they will be employed in vast new factories to make golf balls and 12-bore cartridges. People refusing to move will have their benefits cut off, and if they continue to refuse will be moved by the police.

Amnesty International publishes photographs of the new 'factories' and reveals that they are surrounded by razor-wire. Amnesty compares the camps to the Gulags.


Welcome to the planned economy of Stalin's England. The Ministry of Work is now in control and she or he who runs it, runs the economy. As Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang pointed out in '23 Things they don't tell you about Capitalism', controlling the supply of labour controls the economy by controlling wages; 'Wages in rich countries are determined more by immigration control than by anything else.'  ['Thing 1', page 5]


This is, finally, the supreme irony. The Conservative Party is now the party of the planned economy, the party that tells you what you can do and where you can do it. The party that will be faced with a choice between visas for care workers and visas for stablehands...and will favour the horses over the nurses every time. These are the real Red Tories.



Back in Shropshire it only takes the boss a few minutes to work out that the best thing she can do is relocate her firm to Scotland. In newly-independent Scotland there is free movement of labour, and open access to the vast market of the EU.

This is the independence bonus, the huge boost to Scotland that will come when England Brexits and an independent Scotland Remains. Let's get there.

Vote Right

Scotland is a tiny, poor, meaningless appendage on the edge of Britain, whose tenement-born population are condemned to Tory rule for the rest of their lifetimes.

That's the depressing picture this morning.

Westminster now has the most right-wing government in a generation. Amber Rudd and Jeremy Hunt have made racism OK.  The mainstream media, controlled by a handful of right-wing barons, will take up this theme and soon we will have lynchings in the streets. Rupert Murdoch and Lord Rothermere, who between them control 60% of UK print media, will (ironically, in Murdoch's case) bang the no-foreigners drum.

As the excellent Dr Tanja Bueltmann has pointed out, they - the barons and the Tories - are shining their Tory-blue spotlights on 'foreigners' and 'immigrants' in order to distract our attention from the bigger issues.

The bigger issues are much, much more important than the bash-the-migrants distractions of the Tories. They are as big as the millions of refugees fleeing wars created, in part, by Westminster governments. As big as the poverty that affects 220,0000 children in Scotland, or that means poor Scots cannot warm their homes this winter. As big as climate change.

The people of Scotland did not vote for this right-wing mess. Scotland's view will be ignored while Westminster plunges into the Dark Ages of a 21st century Fortress Britain.

Dear Aymara

23rd June 2036

Dear Aymara

Happy 20th birthday!

When your dad - my son - met your Mum in that refugee detention centre in Greece back in 2015 her situation was desperate. She had escaped with her sister from the cluster bombs of Aleppo and then spent three months walking across Turkey trying to avoid the kidnappers and the people-traffickers.

You were born on the day that Britain voted to stay in Europe.

Thanks to a massive vote in Scotland in favour of staying in, the UK voted 51% to 49% to remain. It was horribly close. The campaign for the EU Referendum was particularly nasty, focusing on migration in a way that hinted at, even if it did not directly condone, discrimination. This was especially ironic in Britain whose islands were populated by migrants who had settled there after the last ice age, and then by endless waves of peoples - Romans, Vikings, Normans… after that. Britain had been the source of huge migrations to Canada, the USA and Australia, and then had taken back the people of the world either as refugees (the Jewish children and the Norwegian resistance during WWII) or because it needed the labour force. The result is that the Glasgow I know and love is a wonderful mixture of Vikings and Pakistanis, of Picts and Italians (Mr Nardini in Largs always made the best ice cream!), of Afro-Caribbeans and Irish.

I am a migrant, one of the hundreds of thousands who has taken advantage of the EU to move to Catalonia (remember your tenth birthday, when we cerebrated Catalonia becoming independent? That was a p-a-r-t-y!!!) You spent last year as an Erasmus student in Paris being a migrant. You and I know that migrants are good for their adopted country; you were able to help your new friends in Paris to understand what happened in Syria all those years ago and I saw the lovely pictures of the dinner you cooked for them; dolmades from Greece, Kebab Halabi from Aleppo and cranachan from Scotland!!

In the end the EU referendum was not about migration. It could never be about migration in a country made by migrants. It was about beliefs.

The closeness of the vote, like the Referendum in Scotland two years previously, made us all think. What did we believe in? Did we believe in a US style of capitalism, focused on individual freedoms? Or in the European style of welfare state that protects people who are poor, in pain or in need?

Thanks to the EU Referendum our special European model, the welfare state, was revived.

That meant the end of a set of political beliefs started when I was about your age by a Westminster leader called Margaret Thatcher. She believed (it sounded reasonable at the time) that if you cut back on the state's responsibilities and cut taxes, the rich would be encouraged to be more entrepreneurial, building new businesses and creating new jobs. The result would be that the wealth would 'trickle down' to the poor.

By the time you were born (under a different prime minister called David Cameron - but I doubt you know his name, he left no mark in history) it was obvious that this idea, called 'neoliberalism', did not work. The gap between the rich and the poor had widened. Not only had neoliberalism made hundreds of thousands of people in the UK poorer, it had allowed people of wealth to stash away billions in secret hiding places, including many former British colonies. The wealth was not trickling down. It was bleeding out.

The people of the British isles - migrants all of us - voted for our belief in a welfare state.  The revival of the welfare state has finally started to close the gap between wealth and poverty. You and I and 500 million other people across Europe have benefited in the last 20 years from the results of that choice by the people of Britain. We have had opportunities - from your education to my pension - that we might not have had, had Britain voted itself out of the arms of Europe.

Enjoy every day of that - your birthday especially.

Love

Grandpa

Triple Lock: Westminster

Calais, Corbyn and cocaine: Westminster is caught in a triple lock.

Calais

In Calais  there are between 1,000-5,000 refugees waiting for a chance to cross the Channel while living in conditions that would have looked good in the Dark Ages. This is a humanitarian question linked to the humanitarian question faced on both sides of the Mediterranean where refugees from Syria and the Daesh wars are getting to anarchic Libya and then risking their lives to reach Italy. 

Calais is just 20 miles from England. It is not some far away place with a difficult to pronounce name. It would be easy, terribly easy, for Westminster to help out. Basic humanitarian aid would suffice - latrines, clean water, blankets, simple housing. Irrespective of whether or not you think it is "right" that more than a thousand men, women and children are camping out in Calais, you could help, Osbameron. But you don't.

Why not? Because you are locked into a debate about migration with the right wing of your party and with UKIP, scared stiff that if you are seen to help the Calais migrants the voters in those precious marginals will slip across the border to UKIP.

Corbyn

The debate over - shock, horror - Jeremy Corbyn's anti-austerity manifesto is the key to the second of Westminster's triple locks. Westminster is locked into the belief that the only treatment for the economy - for any economy, Greek, German or English - is austerity. Cut and cut and cut until the State is bled of all its powers of intervention and the free market can have its head. Don't consider who suffers - it is always the poor - but focus on the numbers, the magical £12 billion that Osbameron believe to be our overspend. Do not, above all, do what Mr Corbyn suggests and tax the rich because then they will all jump ship, possibly moving to a shack in Calais to evade an increase in income tax.

Why are the mainstream parties in Westminster locked into austerity? It is hard to explain, but it is beginning to feel like a 594-person mass hysteria (yes, that's 650 MPs less our lovely #SNP56).

Cocaine

The Summer Silly Season story of stories is called Sewel. A Lord of the Realm caught snorting cocaine...whilst hanging around naked with prostitutes. You could not make it up. But along with the knighting of Lord Better Together it has shone a useful light on Westminster's third lock - the House of Lords. 


The House of Lords is an anachronism, a spit in the face of democracy. It is ridiculous verging on weird that the future of the people of Scotland should be decided by a bunch of charlatans in ermine selected for their safe, on-side views by Blairaq and Osbameron.

But the Commons and the Lords are padlocked locked together in Westminster. And not just for the sexy bondage sensation it seems to give them. The Lords hold the key to the safe, ensuring that whatever we commoners decide can be nudged and tweaked and adjusted so that it fits with the capital needs of the great British empire.


Westminster is truly trapped in its triple lock. People in England, just like people in Scotland, Wales and Ireland suffer as a result.

 
Time for an independent Scotland to release the people of Britain from the gargantuan padlock that is Westminster.

Horsemen of Hypnosis

England appears hypnotized. How else can one explain the inaction, inertia, blindness, sleepwalking? The country is heading into a perfect storm which will make the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse look like a Sunday School picnic.

Here they are;

The Pestilence of Poverty

Are England's ruling class aware of poverty, outside their own back door? This is the scandal of the wealth gap - the UK's near-to-worst position (24th in 2011, ahead - just - of Israel, Turkey and Chile...) in the OECD list of countries ranked by wealth gap.

We know from charities and from walking the streets that there are far too many people who have little or nothing. And from walking streets not many blocks away, too many with too much.

Britain, and especially the privileged bubble of Westminster has created a society of two tribes. The Rich Tribe is comfortable in its cars and its brand-name shops, while Sebastian ('he's something in the City, darling') squeezes the max out of his salary and bonus package. Its politicians are happy to reduce benefits and tax the spare rooms of the poor because they never consciously encounter the Poor Tribe.

The people who cross this tribal divide are the philanthropists. Not just the high profile people of wealth, but the thousands of people who know that poverty is not another world and who give their money to good causes. But there are not enough philanthropists to fill the growing wealth gap. And some day the Poor Tribe are going to have had enough. 

There will be an explosion in the streets of Britain.

The War Horse

It is Poseidon's weapon of choice. It sits sizzling just 25 miles upwind of Glasgow. And it is costing you, and you, and you a King's ransom. The UK parliamentary committee that met to approve its upgrade reckon £80 billion over the next twenty years... but that's one of those defence spending estimates that has a habit of increasing, maybe doubling.

And yet the English public seem blind to the atomic war horse that is Trident. Most will spend most of their working lives paying for it through their taxes. Some, the million Scots living downwind of Faslane, may one day sniff it in the air. But only a tiny number seem to care. Think how many schools and hospitals you could build, equip and run for £80 billion!

The Financial Famine

Yesterday's Financial Times reminded us that the UK is horribly in debt, and that the debt is getting worse each year, despite awful cuts to social services. ONS says that the debt is now £1.4 trillion. This year it is likely to be £100 billion more.

Britain is sleepwalking into the red, with a government that is meant to be good at financial management. But this is a neo-liberal government that refuses to the sensible thing (tax wealth to pay the debt.) Instead it has announced tax relief on wealth, and further cuts in benefits for poor.

One morning we will wake to the news that a trader in the Far East, a new Soros, has decided that the UK economy can't support the debt and that the pound is worthless. When that particular horseman arrives he'll be galloping, and the apocalypse will be fast. The collapse of the pound ('if only we'd joined the Euro when we had chance!') will mean hyperinflation and massive social unrest. A very British apocalypse.

The Death of the World

The palid horse of Death also approaches, across the Channel. It is the Death of Britain's world, and the rebirth of Little England. The people of England seem to have become afraid of anything foreign, starting with the 'terrorists' and now encompassing the EU and its massed ranks of 'immigrants.'

England, exporter of migrants to her colonies where they were supposed be a civilising influence, now fears migrants who might civilise the Motherland. Students are now blocked from entering the UK to study here. Entrepreneurs and new corporate recruits (the CBI complained last week) are facing delays and refusals at our borders. And Prime Minister Cameron has flown the dangerous kite that he will attempt to remove the right of EU citizens to move to and work in any Member State. His kite string will snap in the combined storm of protest from Germany and France over this core principle of the EU.

But this fourth horseman appears to be invisible to many in England. To the UKIP supporters and the loonie right of course, but also to Conservative and Labour voters. Can these Little Englanders not see the illogic of their position? 'We emigrate' equals 'good'. 'They emigrate' equals 'bad'. Really? 

And do they not see the dangers? Targeting immigration means targeting immigrants and that smells, quickly, of racism. And of course Britain will be expelled from the EU - even if England does not vote the whole UK out - if it persists with this folly.

 

Hypnotic Men on Horses

Why are the people of England blind to the four horsemen? It seems to be an almost perfect disconnect between the English and their politicians. A disconnect made obvious by the contrast with Scotland, where these topics were aired and discussed for the Referendum and continue to be the subject of writing, thinking and discussion afterwards.

But for hypnotised England the clip-clop of hooves is already audible. We just don't know which horse will come in first; poverty, and social turmoil when poor people finally sicken of the cuts? The a massive sell out of sterling when the markets discover that our debt is unpayable, ever? A 'tragic accident' at Faslane? Or the loss of Britain's largest trading partner? Or will all four Horsemen arrive together in a perfect storm?



Whatever. It's coming. Someone, please: wake up England.