Looking in the Wrong Direction

The appalling set of proposals announced by Shabana Mahmood on asylum seekers, lauded by the right-wing press, punitive and inhuman in just the way they like, is a mark of shame on the UK’s Labour government. It is performative cruelty dressed as a disincentive to desperate people seeking sanctuary which will do nothing to stop the small boats but is, purely and simply, an attempt to toss raw steak to Farage supporters in the hope of ‘winning’ them back. It is the clearest evidence, if evidence were needed, that Starmer’s government is looking 90 degrees in the wrong direction – hypnotised by the far-right threat to its own electoral chances, instead of looking to majority opinion in the country and the state of the economy, which together scream the message: return to the European Single Market. The contrast between the ugly asylum policy and the flailing efforts to implement a budget that tries to plug the Grand Canyon-sized hole in the economy by sticking a little finger into it tells you everything you need to know about Looking in the Wrong Direction.

It is also an astonishing failure of strategic imagination. If you want to stop the thuggery of Faragism, here is a simple solution: have a referendum on rejoining the Single Market. It will get a 55-60% Yes, and will scupper the Faragists however rabid the opposition they mount beforehand. It has become a piety in the UK that referendums on the same issue are not re-run for a long time after they have happened – an EU-related referendum now will be 10 years after the last, all the evidence in about how unsafe and polluted the 2016 debacle was and how disastrous its effects have been, and that is time enough; but even if Reform were to win more seats in Parliament at the next election, the immediate positive effects of rejoining the SM and the bulwark of the ‘no repeat until time has passed’ piety, will spike their guns.

Starmer’s own increasingly tenuous position would be strengthened by the move, let the wails of ‘U-turn’ on his (absurd and incomprehensible) election position on the EU sound as loud as they like. Perhaps, though, anyone in Labour seeking to replace him can see this is a powerful platform from which to do it.

And oh – just as an incidental of course – the value to our economy at over £100 billion a year, the bonfire of red tape tangled round the feet of business, the ending of vexation and misery of UK travellers going to their own continent for holidays and retirement, the reversal of UK marginalisation in world affairs, the idea (but perish the thought) that the UK could play a significant part in an important world region in the fragmenting and fragile geopolitical circumstance of today – all this would accrue as well. Small stuff in comparison to strutting stuff about ‘how to be nasty to desperate people’, eh?

While Starmer and his government’s how-to-out-Farage-Farage on small boats (the fleets of which are an outcome of Farage’s own Brexit delusions) are staring like frightened rabbits at Farage, the Labour’s big Commons majority is being wasted: it could effect the policy suggested here and make a macro difference that would really, really change things for the better.

The fig-leaf behind which Starmer has hidden on EU questions is that it would ‘reignite divisions and controversies’. So it would, until the votes are in. What’s wrong with a vigorous debate? It is a feeble ploy at best, and at worst a stark irresponsibility, to duck the matter in order merely to keep the peace. But there is no peace. Brexit is not in the past, it is here right now in national economic and social anaemia and discontent. Brexit has been bleeding the UK’s economy and standing unstoppably, and the only way to staunch the flow is to address it again fully.