Migrant boat tragedies expose parochialism of UK election campaign
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Version 0 of 1. This weekend’s refugee drowning crisis in the Mediterranean throws into shameful relief the parochialism of Britain’s 2015 general election campaign. It is not just about immigration versus humanitarianism, a topic which attracts glib sentiments from both sides. Nor is it just about us. Right across the EU, leaders and the led seem to focus their attention on ever-narrower horizons. It will do none of us much good. “Stop the world, I want to get off” rarely works for long because the pressures of the world have always managed to force their way in during the whole of recorded history. It has never been more easily done than in today’s interconnected world of satellite TV and cheap air travel, especially when national and global institutions capable of imposing some order – they range from the UN to the US, the EU to the IMF – have become so enfeebled. EU divisions will again be on display on Monday. We ought to be talking about this sort of danger in the election campaign, certainly in those televised leaders’ debates many of us watched. Immigration and refugees? Interventionism in foreign conflicts, where staying out has been about as successful in Syria as intervening was in Libya? Foreign aid – not to forget the linchpin policy, UK membership of the EU or the imperatives of climate change? All are treated not as strategic issues for our times, but as mere tactics, sticks with which to beat an opponent. By the standards of even the recent past triple-election-winners such as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, whose moral populism extended well beyond these shores, the major party leaders in 2015 are unimpressive enough. When did Dave, Ed or Nick last make a weighty campaign speech on foreign policy? Labour’s Douglas Alexander tried, but has Phil Hammond (“The worst foreign secretary in history,” an unkind Tory tells me) had a go? I must have missed it in the flurry of unfunded, ill-planned Osborne bribes to voters who know the country can’t afford most of them and probably won’t. Related: Green party manifesto: what Labour says, only more so But the minor parties, which might be expected to offer more innovative alternatives (and do so in several modest ways), are even worse. Yes, I know the Greens have a big-picture view of things. But an economically literate colleague who analysed their manifesto describes its financial calculations as fantasy. Natalie Bennett was obviously sincere in the TV debates and made some smart connections – not least about Tory housing policy – but remains safely distant from hard choices that she could sell to a wary electorate. Assorted nats from the Celtic heartlands are all high-spending state socialists of one kind of another, men and women who would mostly have been UK Labour before being lured by the strange, siren panacea of regional nationalism (how scornful Keir Hardie and Nye Bevan would have been). The absent Northern Irish, whose province is the UK’s most public spending dependant (Whitehall turns a blind eye), are not very different. Left or right populism needs someone else to pay. As for foreign policy discussion, it is enough to make a cat laugh. There is a strong case for challenging Britain’s planned renewal of the four-submarine Trident nuclear deterrent policy as unsuitable to new times. But to challenge it and the cold war theories which underpinned those fearsome missiles for decades you first have to understand what it was all about. Not even Miliband or Nigel Farage – who was trying to play the grownup in last Thursday’s BBC debate – was lucid enough to say what past Labour leaders, steeped in cruel war and brutal diplomacy, would have said as a matter of instinct and experience. “Let’s get this right, Nicola. You want Europe’s nuclear defence against future threat of nuclear attack from any quarter to rest in the hands of France?” And that’s just for starters. Mention of Farage takes us back to those poor souls, locked below deck and drowning in cold Mediterranean waters on Saturday night. Political leaders across Europe have mouthed platitudes in the face of this disaster, Cameron, Clegg and Miliband among them. Last October most agreed to weaken the “pull factor” by cutting funding to hard-pressed Italy’s search and rescue programme. Doing so would discourage risk-taking, so the argument went. It may have helped, but the death toll is mounting. Read Mark Rice-Oxley’s bleak analysis here. Yet Farage tries to build election capital on watery corpses. In at least two of his quickie books – Flying Free and The Purple Revolution – the Ukip leader is kind or calculating enough to make flattering references to me, as one of those reporters who took many of Ukip supporters’ concerns seriously from the early days. I am happy to plead guilty as charged. But that courtesy never extended to the party leadership – lazy, complacent, too keen to cry “Gosh, opening time already” – to do real justice to serious policy-making of the kind needed to make life better for their purple revolutionary foot soldiers, instead of worse. Saloon bar pundit Farage is bright enough to wing it on the telly and lazy enough not to understand just how glib a public school Hooray Henry he can sound to those of us dumbos who decided to stay on at school. So he wants to slash foreign aid at a time when the Libyan refugee shipwreck reminds us all that aid is enlightened self-interest, though we could always manage it better. If we help make abroad a more attractive option – less vulnerable to war, more open to economic betterment – fewer people will be so desperate that they will entrust their lives and savings to the hands of cynical smugglers and pirates who take their money, then kill them. They do so with a callousness which kindly liberals find hard to imagine except in investment bankers. Glib on cue Farage also makes election capital by blaming David Cameron (and Nicholas Sarkozy, then president of France) for being too keen to intervene in Libya to help overthrow the Gaddafi regime in 2011 and render its borders chaotic and porous. Yes, it’s proved a dreadful outcome so far, but so has non-intervention in Syria and many other places – Congo anyone? – where the UN, Nato, EU, etc lacked the will or capacity to step in and deflect chaos. It is not all our fault, not even mostly so. The Roman empire was pretty good at imposing order and hanging pirates, as Julius Caesar famously did. So have several in the intervening centuries, including the British Mediterranean Fleet out of Malta. In its heyday long long ago, the Ottoman empire hired a Barbary – north African – pirate chief to run its fleet: poacher turned gamekeeper. The first serious foreign foray of the infant American republic (under Thomas Jefferson) was to tackle Barbary pirates demanding protection on “the shores of Tripoli” as the anthem goes. As in the Indian Ocean off Somalia, the current crisis presents a potent brew of lawless and opportunist piracy, refugees with cash and a dash of Islamist ideology to add fear to hunger. But the awkward fact is that there is no easy solution to the mass migration of people and never has been, short of unacceptable brutality by one side or the other – the incoming, land-hungry Vikings or King Alfred, assorted Goths or the western Roman empire, the cowboys or the Apache. Related: 'At night it's like a horror movie' – inside Calais's official shanty town As Farage never stops to explain, Europe’s birthrate is falling dramatically and its skills base has serious gaps at both top and bottom ends. It has relatively generous benefit systems, worth enduring the hellhole of a Calais camp in winter for. Except for the toughest and most resourceful – we meet them running businesses every day, don’t we? – Europe is not the El Dorado it’s cracked up to be: unemployment is high, resentment rising. Most wannabe newcomers don’t understand the risks. To that extent it’s a bit like voting Ukip or SNP. You can see why desperate people might be tempted to take a chance, hoping that the leaky boat in which they seek to embark will deliver them safely on dry land. “Things can’t be any worse,” they tell themselves. Oh yes, they can. But solutions are complex, sometimes expensive, rarely short term. Can our politicians and our voters cope with complexity and the long term? I hope so, but as Mark Rice-Oxley notes online readership interest is low. Let’s all try harder. |