John Harris
Politics is about the manipulation of appearances rather than any concrete outcomes.
by John Harris
With 18 months until the next election, welcome to the latest phase of Conservative politics. Modernisation now looks like a brief nightmare from which a relieved party has awoken, and most elements of the Tory agenda seem to have been signed off by their campaigning guru Lynton Crosby. As a very insightful piece in the current issue of the New Statesman puts it: “No 10 aides boast that campaign strategy and policymaking are now inseparable.” In other words: plans are afoot that will have a profound effect on millions of lives, but they have almost no basis in what we once called “evidence-based policy”, and everything to do with desperate electioneering. The result is a meandering popularism that ignores questions about where the country might end up and fixates on the most cynical of political games.
Last week, we got Theresa May’s new immigration bill, full of moves that have been talked up for the last 18 months, which looks set to become law in the spring. No matter that the number of illegal immigrants in the UK may be as many as 1 million, that thousands of them have long since had UK-raised children, and that many toil in parts of the economy that would crumble without their contribution: as well as deterring potential illegals in the future, May wants them either to be forcibly removed much more easily, or to feel the sharp shock of a “really hostile environment”, and decide to go home, wherever that is.
The policies won’t work. The urban demi-monde of landlordism, illicit employment and lives lived in the most precarious circumstances will balloon. Moreover, as the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association has pointed out, a “hostile environment” for one part of the population will entail a pretty trying time for everyone else, and routine identity checks for the whole adult population.
As the Tories’ approach to so-called welfare hardens to the point of institutionalised cruelty, another election-oriented wheeze is about to arrive. In April anyone who is long-term unemployed will have to fall in with the regime the government has called “Help to Work” and, under pain of having their benefits stopped, be forced to either spend 35 hours a week in their local job centre, do indefinite unpaid community work, or agree to “compulsory training”. The “sanctions” system which is already pushing people into borderline destitution is sure to become even more arbitrary and punitive. In political terms, whether any of this will actually work is scarcely relevant. After all, the existing work programme doesn’t work: thanks to the National Audit Office, we now know you’ve got a better chance of finding a job if you go nowhere near it. But for now, it doesn’t matter: more than ever, politics is about the manipulation of appearances rather than any concrete outcomes, and, in the collective Conservative mind, as long as the party is coming down hard on an imagined army of immigrants and malingerers, all is well.
This year’s Tory conference made all this plain. Everywhere you looked were pristine banners dedicating the proceedings to “hardworking people”. The Conservative record was reduced to the simplest essence: “Welfare capped, crime down, immigration down.” Party conferences are seemingly designed to make you feel like you are going mad, but this one often felt downright chilling – so cold, mechanical and crass that it rather brought to mind such dystopian films as V For Vendetta and Children of Men.
Amid the bathos and farce of British politics, that might sound alarmist. But if nasty populism meanders on and on, you run the risk of arriving at a society that will feel hateful and soulless even to the millions of people who were said to be willing its creation (including, I would imagine, plenty of Tories).
If you want a sense of where we might be going, consider the fact that the Red Cross is to get involved in food aid in Britain for the first time since 1945, and imagine the most likely results of these latest government moves: even more desperate people, existing on society’s margins, and living from hand to mouth – untouchables, in all but name, there to be kicked around for other people’s political advantage.
Last week, we got a flavour of what Labour thinks. The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, sounded more nuanced notes than Theresa May, but said moves on illegal immigrants’ bank accounts seemed “sensible”, and that the idea of checks by landlords was “sensible in principle”.
THE GUARDIAN
Politics is about the manipulation of appearances rather than any concrete outcomes.
by John Harris
With 18 months until the next election, welcome to the latest phase of Conservative politics. Modernisation now looks like a brief nightmare from which a relieved party has awoken, and most elements of the Tory agenda seem to have been signed off by their campaigning guru Lynton Crosby. As a very insightful piece in the current issue of the New Statesman puts it: “No 10 aides boast that campaign strategy and policymaking are now inseparable.” In other words: plans are afoot that will have a profound effect on millions of lives, but they have almost no basis in what we once called “evidence-based policy”, and everything to do with desperate electioneering. The result is a meandering popularism that ignores questions about where the country might end up and fixates on the most cynical of political games.
Last week, we got Theresa May’s new immigration bill, full of moves that have been talked up for the last 18 months, which looks set to become law in the spring. No matter that the number of illegal immigrants in the UK may be as many as 1 million, that thousands of them have long since had UK-raised children, and that many toil in parts of the economy that would crumble without their contribution: as well as deterring potential illegals in the future, May wants them either to be forcibly removed much more easily, or to feel the sharp shock of a “really hostile environment”, and decide to go home, wherever that is.
The policies won’t work. The urban demi-monde of landlordism, illicit employment and lives lived in the most precarious circumstances will balloon. Moreover, as the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association has pointed out, a “hostile environment” for one part of the population will entail a pretty trying time for everyone else, and routine identity checks for the whole adult population.
As the Tories’ approach to so-called welfare hardens to the point of institutionalised cruelty, another election-oriented wheeze is about to arrive. In April anyone who is long-term unemployed will have to fall in with the regime the government has called “Help to Work” and, under pain of having their benefits stopped, be forced to either spend 35 hours a week in their local job centre, do indefinite unpaid community work, or agree to “compulsory training”. The “sanctions” system which is already pushing people into borderline destitution is sure to become even more arbitrary and punitive. In political terms, whether any of this will actually work is scarcely relevant. After all, the existing work programme doesn’t work: thanks to the National Audit Office, we now know you’ve got a better chance of finding a job if you go nowhere near it. But for now, it doesn’t matter: more than ever, politics is about the manipulation of appearances rather than any concrete outcomes, and, in the collective Conservative mind, as long as the party is coming down hard on an imagined army of immigrants and malingerers, all is well.
This year’s Tory conference made all this plain. Everywhere you looked were pristine banners dedicating the proceedings to “hardworking people”. The Conservative record was reduced to the simplest essence: “Welfare capped, crime down, immigration down.” Party conferences are seemingly designed to make you feel like you are going mad, but this one often felt downright chilling – so cold, mechanical and crass that it rather brought to mind such dystopian films as V For Vendetta and Children of Men.
Amid the bathos and farce of British politics, that might sound alarmist. But if nasty populism meanders on and on, you run the risk of arriving at a society that will feel hateful and soulless even to the millions of people who were said to be willing its creation (including, I would imagine, plenty of Tories).
If you want a sense of where we might be going, consider the fact that the Red Cross is to get involved in food aid in Britain for the first time since 1945, and imagine the most likely results of these latest government moves: even more desperate people, existing on society’s margins, and living from hand to mouth – untouchables, in all but name, there to be kicked around for other people’s political advantage.
Last week, we got a flavour of what Labour thinks. The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, sounded more nuanced notes than Theresa May, but said moves on illegal immigrants’ bank accounts seemed “sensible”, and that the idea of checks by landlords was “sensible in principle”.
THE GUARDIAN
