There is nothing that the Right wing of the Labour party hate more than the Left wing of the Labour party.
The fundamental schism was revealed back when Corbyn was elected with 60% of the vote of the membership, but hardly any support from sitting MPs. Labour MPs are still a largely Blairite group who rose up the ranks during the last Labour government, who want to make the usual politician’s leap into the corporate world when they retire, and will never forgive the left for being correct on the Iraq war.
Everything, including the antisemitism purge has been a disingenuous excuse to get rid of the party’s left wing and stop it having any influence at all.
Back on the main topic, Sunak now appears to have more opposition because he’s been in the job over a year, and the tory party’s rules mean that it’s now possible to raise letters of non-confidence in the leader again. The party is tearing itself apart over whether being more cruel on immigration will make the coming election worse or better for them, because every MP’s route to the leadership is now “First, survive the next election, then grab the leadership after the coming bloodbath”. There’s also the possibility of a split, with some eyeing up the prospect of jumping to Reform UK. A real split in the Right is something that’s never really happened in the UK, and would make the whole thing even more unpredictable.
Indeed - we may at last be seeing the end of the one thing that has allowed Tories to retain power for so many years - its party unity.
They will fight like rats in a sack until the election (each figuring out how to retain their seat) and once in opposition I suspect unity will re-prevail assuming they can find a leader capable of that job. In the entirely possible event that they cannot, and do not for 4-5 years, Starmer ought to get a second term as long as he manages to achieve a few somethings (anythings) and not make things worse.
But Brexit fucks him over too. He cannot come out against it, but it is at the root of the immigration problem and unless he finds some at least partial solution, it may be the one thing the Tories will make gains over.
… succinctly and more accurately describes the root causes of the rise in small boat crossings (which is what the Rwanda performance is all about pretending to stop).
Click through to the PDF and it is a 55 page report. But the Foreword, Executive Summary and Main Conclusions take only 5 pages and, to my mind, sum it all up very well.
(I have not yet read the rest. NB it was written in Feb 23 so is out of date on several recent developments in terms of UK court decisions and legislation.)
The key point, to my mind, is that before Brexit there were not really any small boat crossings. The awful Brexit Agreement almost ensured they would ramp up. Instead of performative Rwanda crap, fixing that agreement re migration/asylum/returns would achieve so much more.
But Rwanda is electoral (or internal Tory party) red meat and EU co-operation/re-negotiation would be ‘surrender’, of course, to these fuckwits.
And there was also hardly any asylum claim processing backlog for the early part of the coalition period - May was probably largely responsible for what happened there, and her successors (with the honourable(!) exception of Amber Rudd*) gleefully bought into the raging right-wing rage machine that led us here.
Now we have an enormous backlog that could be sorted out fairly quickly but then there wouldn’t be any exciting headlines to rile people up.
*she had the good grace to actually resign over the Windrush scandal despite not really being responsible for any of it. I mean, she’s also a terrible person but she clearly still had some vague semblance of a conscience.
The one bit I didn’t see; but would be curious to know more about; is the incentive behind so many people taking the (nontrivial) cost and risk to go from mainland Europe to the UK.
The countries of origin tend to make a fairly obvious case for not wanting to be there anymore; but in order to reach the ‘small boat’ category the people in question have travelled through at least one, usually several, EU member states that tick about as many asylum-related boxes as you are reasonably likely to find; which makes the urgency harder to grasp.
It was the UK’s self-own to just not bother to maintain an agreement that would allow them to send people coming from the EU irregularly back; but that doesn’t tell us why people are paying human traffickers nontrivial amounts of money to risk drowning in the channel to escape France.
English is a lingua franca (ironically, given they all end up in France)
Many are trying to reunite with family that made it here before the recent excess fuckwittery
They know there is no mechanism for returning them (unlike EU countries where if they claimed asylum, many might fail and get sent home)
The people smugglers exploit all of the above. (People pay large sums for a place on a ‘small boat’ provided by these criminals, who overload the boats and don’t always even provide enough life jackets, if any.)
Probably more reasons, but that’s more than enough to justify most cases, I suspect.
It also plays to the right’s characterisation of many of these people as economic migrants under the guide of asylum seeking, not genuine asylum seekers. But it is surprising how many who do claim asylum and are turned down, win on appeal. Fewer are turned down or need to appeal seeing as the other tactic of the govt is to take forever to process claims - partly through incompetence and bad planning (and it backfired when the hotel bills ballooned) but partly, one suspects, to keep the number officially ‘admitted’ suppressed.
Which is also counter-productive, since it’s been repeatedly established that “economic migrants” are almost always net contributors to the economy; that’s kind of the point of why they are trying to come to a richer country. It’s not to mooch off our benefits system (which is worse than pretty much anywhere else), but, of course, it suits the frothers to pretend that it is.
(See also: Mexico Wall)
The moment they deal in logic they are lost. Nobody to ‘other’. Nobody to blame for all our ills (not enough jobs, not enough houses, underfunded NHS, collapsing benefits system, and so on)
Australian here. Can confirm. It’s cruel and batshit insane, and it’s been turned into a political land mine. No elected official will touch the status quo, because a sufficient chunk of voters have been primed to be triggered by the words “soft on boats”.
Like so many other awful parts of modern Australian society, it was former Prime Minister John Howard to ratcheted things up to this level.
We give time and money to organizations that are fighting a sane outcome, but it’s an uphill battle.
Yes, that’s exactly the Australian model.
I was surprised what mollifies people, especially those who think the Rwanda policy is a good one. I watched in-laws lose their fucking minds over boat arrivals in Australia - a minor-scale issue that elected assholes blew up into a crisis.
The one silver lining in this mess in the UK is that is signifies a panic-stricken government. When John Howard pushed this madness in 2001, it was a Hail Mary pass. An election was looming and the government was on the ropes. Unfortunately, it “worked” in Australia, in that the rhetoric got the government re-elected. My fingers are crossed that Sunak left it too late, and this madness won’t save him. If the policy can in any way be spun to look like it helped a politician, then God help the UK. Australia is still at least a decade away from getting its soul back over this one.
I don’t think it will work here, simply because the general UK population aren’t really worried about boats and immigration, but they are hugely worried about the wars, the cost of living, the climate crisis, and the fact that nothing works any more.
Schools, hospitals, public transport, the roads, the criminal justice system, social services, child care, elder care, fisheries, housing, agricultural policy, the water system, energy supply, the economy in general; it’s all gone wrong. Half our local councils are effectively bankrupt, yet you can be arrested and imprisoned for up to 10 years for holding up a blank sheet of paper.
There is a mood in the country. People have made up their minds that the Conservatives must go.
Over here Tory politicians try to make “small boats” sound scary, as if the English Channel is full of gigantic “small boats” carrying millions of “illegal migrants”.
