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I’m just back from France, where my direct experience of riots and looting was non-existent, although I had walked past a Montpellier branch of Swarkowski the day before it ceased to be. My indirect experience was quite extensive though, since I watched the talking heads on French TV project their instant analysis onto the unfolding anarchy. Naturally, they discovered that all their existing prejudices were entirely confirmed by events. The act that caused the wave of protests and then wider disorder was the police killing of Nahel Merzouk, 17, one of a succession of such acts of police violence against minorites. Another Arab kid from a poor area. French police kill about three times as many people as the British ones do, though Americans can look away now.
One of the things that makes it difficult for me to write blogs these days is the my growing disgust at the professional opinion-writers who churn out thought about topics they barely understand, coupled with the knowledge that the democratization of that practice, about twenty years ago, merely meant there were more people doing the same. And so it is with opinion writers and micro-bloggers about France, a ritual performance of pre-formed clichés and positions, informed by some half-remembered French history and its literary and filmic representations (Les Misérables, La Haine), and, depending on the flavour you want, some some Huntingtonian clashing or some revolting against structural injustice. Francophone and Anglophone commentators alike, trapped in Herderian fantasies about the nation, see these events as a manifestation of essential Frenchness that tells us something about that Frenchness and where it is heading to next. Rarely, we’ll get a take that makes some comparison to BLM and George Floyd.
I even read some (British) commentator opining that what was happening on French estates was “unimaginable” to British people. Well, not to this one, who remembers the wave of riots in 1981 (wikipedia: “there was also rioting in …. High Wycombe”) and, more recently, the riots in 2011 that followed the police shooting of a young black man, Mark Duggan, and where protest against police violence and racism soon spilled over into country-wide burning and looting, all to be followed by a wave of repression and punitive sentencing, directed by (enter stage left) Keir Starmer. You can almost smell the essential Frenchness of it all.
There is much to despair about in these French evenements. Police racism is real and unaddressed, and the situation people, mostly from minorities, on peripheral sink estates, is desperate. Decades of hand-wringing and theorizing, together with a few well-meaning attempts to do something have led nowhere. Both politicians and people need the police (in its varied French forms) to be the heroic front line of the Republican order against the civilizational enemy, and so invest it with power and prestige – particularly after 2015 when there was some genuine police heroism and fortitude during the Paris attacks – but then are shocked when “rogue elements” employ those powers in arbitrary and racist violence. But, no doubt, the possibility of cracking a few black and Arab heads was precisely what motivated many of them to join up in the first place.
On the other side of things, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France Insoumise are quite desperate to lay the mantle of Gavroche on teenage rioters excited by the prospect of a violent ruck with the keufs, intoxicated by setting the local Lidl on fire and also keen on that new pair of trainers. (Fun fact: the Les Halles branch of Nike is only yards from the fictional barricade where Hugo had Gavroche die.) There may be something in the riots as inarticulate protest against injustice theory, but the kids themselves were notably ungrateful to people like the LFI deputy Carlos Martens Bilongo whose attempts to ventriloquise their resistance were rewarded with a blow on the head. Meanwhile, over at the Foxisant TV-station C-News, kids looting Apple stores are the vanguard of the Islamist Great Replacement, assisted by the ultragauche. C-News even quote Renaud Camus.
Things seem to be calming down now, notably after a deplorable attack on the home of a French mayor that left his wife with a broken leg after she tried to lead her small children to safety. As a result, the political class have closed ranks in defence of “Republican order” since “democracy itself” is now under threat. I think one of the most tragic aspects of the last few days has been the way in which various protagonists have been completely sincere and utterly inauthentic at the same time. The partisans of “Republican order” and “democracy” perform the rituals of a system whose content has been evacuated, yet they don’t realise this as they drape tricolours across their chests. With political parties gone or reduced to the playthings of a few narcissistic leaders, mass absention in elections, the policy dominance of a super-educated few, and the droits de l’homme at the bottom of the Mediterranean, what we have is a kind of zombie Republicanism. Yet the zombies believe, including that all French people, regardless of religion or race, are true equals in the indivisible republic. At the same time, those cheering on revolt and perhaps some of those actually revolting, sincerly believing in the true Republicanism of their own stand against racism and injustice, even as the kids pay implicit homage to the consumer brands in the Centres Commerciaux. But I don’t want to both-sides this: the actual fighting will die down but there will be war in the Hobbesian sense of a time when the will to contend by violence is sufficiently known, until there is justice for boys like Nahel and until minorities are really given the equality and respect they are falsely promised in France, but also in the UK and the US. Sadly, the immediate prospect is more racism and more punishment as the reaction to injustice is taken as the problem that needs solving.
Crooked Timber was inaccessible yesterday, due to a dns issue, but here’s another picture of Alexanderplatz:
In a democracy one might, naively, imagine that political deliberation would involve the presentation of the arguments that people think bear on the question at hand. That is, if someone is in favour of a policy they would present the arguments that they believe support it and if someone is against it they they would do the opposite. One of the surreal aspects of British parliamentary debate on refugees and asylum is that neither the government nor the opposition do anything of the kind, and nor, for that matter do the media do much to improve things.
Consider, that everybody knows that Rishi Sunak’s harsh denial of the right to claim asylum of those who arrive “illegally” is motivated by the fact that the base of the Tory party and a sizeable chunk of “red wall” voters are strongly anti-immigration and that Tory strategists are concerned about the “small boats” issue, both because they are worried that a lack of border control gives off a sign of incompetence and because they want to expose Labour as “weak” on “illegal immigration”. In the Tory press, refugees and asylum seekers are constantly demonized as freeloaders, economic migrants, and young male invaders who pose a threat both of sexual predation and terrorism. (The European far-right, including Italy’s Salvini, France’s Zemmour, and the German AfD, in praising the British policy, do so explicitly as keeping the brown hordes at bay.) Labour, on the other hand, while they have a poor record of support for refugee rights, at least stand for maintaining the current human rights framework and upholding the right to claim asylum as set out in the 1951 Convention.
So far, however, in Parliamentary discussion of the issue, the Tories have posed as the real humanitarians, concerned about the most vulnerable and desperate to stop people from undertaking dangerous journeys. Labour, on the other hand, have said little about the basic immorality of the policy and have focused on the claim that the proposed law will be ineffective and that the boats will still come. Neither Sunak nor Starmer stand up and articulate the real reasons why one proposes and the other opposes the law. In Sunak’s case one imagines the primary motivation for this conduct is a debating tactic; in Starmer’s a concern that a proper defence of human rights and the refugee framework would be electorally costly.
Somewhat paradoxically, then, it is in the unelected chamber, the House of Lords, where we are most likely to see a proper debate that approximates the democratic ideal, as the Lords, not facing election, are free to articulate the reasons they think most relevant to the policy. We can be sure, for example, that Lord Dubs,someone who escaped Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport, will say all the things that Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper are too cowardly to.
Meanwhile the press and broadcast media do worse than nothing to explain to the democratic public what the issues are, who the refugees and asylum seekers are, what is the relevant international humanitarian law, what is the history of refugee protection, and so on. Rather, the “small boats” issue is presented as an immediate crisis that needs urgent resolution lest the asylum system and indeed the entire country be “overwhelmed”. Rare indeed is the press report that informs the public that “illegal entry” without penalty is explitly provided for in the 1951 Convention. Those who clamour most loudly for the “people” to decide on migration issues are also most concerned to mislead the public about the facts: the false and insincere debate in Parliament is mirrored by a narrative where the “concerns” of a ignorant public need to be pandered to.
In the past few days, the substance of the issue has also been pushed to the background by a secondary debate about whether the impartiality of the BBC has been compromised by Gary Lineker, a former footballer and sports presenter, who compared government discourse around asylum to Germany in the 1930s. Cue a bunch of ministers invoking Jewish family members to argue about the offensive nature of a comparison between their “humanitarian” concerns and the Nazis. Yet comparisons with the 1930s are actually very much to the point, in the following sense: many Jews fleeing the Nazis were refused asylum in countries including the UK, and many travelled through “safe countries” to try to get here. Rishi Sunak is not Hitler, but Sunak’s policies, in denying the right to claim asylum on UK soil, would, if applied in the 1930s have prevented many from finding sanctuary. One of the motivations behind the postwar refugee framework has been “never again”. But it seems never does not last forever.
[Update: under government pressure, the BBC has forced Lineker to “step back” from presenting Match of the Day.]
The UK is a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention, along with a number of other international instruments providing for humanitarian protection. The Convention provides that someone who is a refugee – a status that they have on the basis of their objective circumstances, having a well-founded fear of persecution on specific grounds and being outside their country of citizenship or habitual residence – must be granted certain protections by signatory countries. The most important of these is that they not be sent back to a place where they are at risk of persecution. The weakness of the Convention is that people cannot usually secure recognition as refugees by a country unless they claim asylum on its territory. Accordingly, wealthy nations seek to make it the case that those wanting protection cannot physically or legally get onto the territory to make a claim. That way, states can both vaunt their status as human rights defenders (“we support the Convention”) and nullify its effect in practice.
Today, ostensibly as a response to the “small boats” crisis, which has seen tens of thousands of people from countries such as Afghanistan and Iran arrive in the south of England after crossing the channel, the Conservative government has announced new plans to deter refugees. Those arriving will no longer be able to claim asylum in the UK, as the government will not try to find out whether they are refugees or not, they will be detained, and then they will be removed to their country of origin or to a third country (potentially breaching the non-refoulement provision of the Convention). The plan has been to send them to Rwanda, although because of legal challenges nobody has actually been sent and, anyway, Rwanda lacks the capacity. Even the plan to detain arrivals in the UK runs up against the problem that the UK lacks the accommodation to do so. In addition, people who cross in small boats are to be denied the possibility of ever settling in the UK or of securing citizenship. So as well as being a stain on the UK’s human rights record and a measure of great cruelty, the plans appear to be practically unworkable.
The government, echoed by the Labour opposition, blames “evil smuggling gangs” as the “root cause” of the small boats crisis. But, of course, the real root cause of the crisis are the measures the UK takes to evade its obligations under the Refugee Conventions, measures that make it necessary for anyone wanting to claim asylum on the territory to enter without the authorization of the UK government. People at risk of persecution, whether Iranian women protesting against the veil, or Afghan translators who worked with the British government, are not granted regular visas to hop on a flight, nor will they be able to get to the UK by road or rail. The UK has sealed these routes, making those who want to cross turn to the boats as a solution.
This has suited the UK government because it wants to weaponize asylum for domestic political reasons. The UK now has large numbers of people who have waited for years while their claims go unprocessed, all living on a pittance (around £5 a day) and, since COVID, crowded into hotels in large numbers, thereby providing a focus for local resentment and far-right campaigning, which demonizes victims of persecution as potential terrorists and sexual predators. The regularly televised arrivals of boats on the south coast also generate a sense of perma-crisis that fuels popular concern and resentment. This too has political value, unless it makes the government look weak and out of countrol, hence the latest tightening of the screw.
Of course the government and its media supporters claim that many who come are “bogus” and that “genuine refugees” would stop in the first country they passed through that was safe. But none of this survives scrutiny. The presence of people who are not refugees on boats does not detract from the rights of those who are, and the Home Office ends up accepting that most people from a range of countries (Iran, Afghanistan, Eritrea etc) are refugees. There is no obligation under the Convention for refugees just to stop and the first “safe” country, and people may have very good reasons to choose the UK as their destination, including historic links to the UK, family connections, or speaking English. Moreover, the Convention is not just about “safety” but about providing people whose citizenship has been rendered ineffective by persecution with a means to remake their lives as members of a new political community. The UK government seeks to thwart this. A shameful day.
I had a little exchange on twitter and Mastodon yesterday on reading habits. The initial cause of the exchange was the claim that book reading is in decline, and I asked for some evidence of this, which my interlocutor duly provided in the form of a link to a survey of British readers by Booktrust from 2013. The survey documents the reported reading habits of British people, showing them to be correlated with things like age and socio-economics status, with some worrying drop-off in book reading among the young. I’m sure that the advent of TV and even the radio also brought some declines, and it is always hard to know how seriously to take such worries: young people may be reader shorter pieces of writing on the internet, they aren’t just watching TikTok videos.
However my attention was caught by another statistic: a claim that 6 per cent of respondents, “bookworms”, get through around 12 books per month (or 144 per year). Now I read a lot – as I perceive it – and I complete between 50 and 60 books most years. When I read Les Misérables, albeit in French, that took up nearly a quarter of my annual reading. Ulysses, which needed a lot of looking up, reading on the side etc, took me about a fortnight, and I think I went too fast in places. My guess is that most of these super-readers are not reading such works, or the Critique of Pure Reason, but but rather short thrillers and the like. I can get through a PG Wodehouse in a day (and what a joy that is!), so that would be a way to boost the numbers if boosting the numbers alone were something worth caring about, which it isn’t.
There’s also a question about the density and complexity of the text: how fast should you read? Many literary texts demand close attention at the level of the sentence and below, whereas some genre fiction does not. Literary texts also require digestion and contemplation, which in turn demands time away from them while your brain does the processing. Sometimes they call for re-reading in the light of later passages that draw attention to the significance of an earlier element. So, no, having flinched at my inadequacy compared to the 6 per cent of super-readers, my considered view is that my own consumption is about right, if not a little too high.
Always nice to discover something close to home that you were previously unaware of, in this case Nunney Castle, built around 1370 and destroyed nearly 300 years later during the Civil Wars.
Harry mentioned the politics of the second-best in comments to his post on higher education the other day. I guess it falls into something of the same space as non-ideal theory or realism, as opposed to moralism. The basic idea is that we shouldn’t hold out for purity if doing so gets in the way of making the lives of many people, some of them with urgent needs, better. And that makes a lot of sense. Pursuing the ideal policy, refusing to compromise, only allowing for perfect justice can seem like a form of self-indulgence that has real costs for those who can least afford to bear them. We always have to start from where we are, with the resources that we have and making progress can involve messy compromises with people that we don’t much like in order to do the good that we can.
Moreover, the rejection of the second-best in favour of the pursuit of the ideal can have rather dire consequences. Take Lexit (the left-wing case for the UK to leave the European Union) for example. Lexit is premised on the notion that EU membership, by limiting UK sovereignty, would make it harder for a genuine socialist government to implement its economic programme, what, with the EU being “neoliberal” and all that. Some Lexiters, not all, were also in favour of no borders or open borders, and rightly made the argument that the free movement embodied in the European single market was a privilege for (mainly white) European citizens, and one that locked out people from beyond Europe’s borders. EU free movement was racist. But the effect of Brexit, supported on such grounds by Lexiters, has not been to advance the socialist programme but rather to reduce the protections enjoyed by British workers and protections in other areas such as the environment. Brexit has made the UK labour market a little more open to non-Europeans, albeit subject to restrictive visas that make exploitation more likely, but it has not made life easier for people trying to escape conflict and persecution and British refugee policy has become even more punitive with a plan to deport refugees to Rwanda and a threat to abandon the European Convention on Human Rights if it proves an obstacle to state cruelty. The second-best policy of staying in the EU looks a whole lot better from here than the allegedly first-best policy of enabling a sovereign socialist democracy in one country.
But when it comes to particular policy areas, I still have reservations, and none more so than in the general area of migration where my own first-best preferences are for almost open borders (see my book for the caveats). The difficulty with second-best policy in this area is that the compromises it requires mean going along with some pretty nasty state treatment of individuals. This is because any second-best policy involves limits on numbers, selectivity, denying people visas, perhaps breaking up families and certainly other ties, detaining some people, deporting others, co-ercing people onto deportation flights, and so forth, (a non-exhaustive list). A second-best policy involves recognizing the “right” of nation states to do these things to people, albeit fewer people that have these things done to them at present. Because of this, second-best policy will always generate cases where the person subject to state coercion can ask of us whether we stand in solidarity with them or with the state that is subjecting them to be “repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported” (to partially quote from Proudhon). My guess is that most people with a strong sense of justice, even if they recognize the case for having a second-best policy, will instinctively side with the victim and not the victimizer. Such, at any rate, is my own case.
Apologies for the brief photo hiatus. Stuff going on. Anyway, here are some cranes.
FreshRSS 