The Tories are creating a hostile environment - not just for migrants
(Excellent article by John Harris in 'The Guardian'):
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....
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. The bedroom tax doesn't work: the entirely imaginary prospect of three- and four-bedroom houses being freed up was always going to bump up against the complete lack of one- and two-bedroom social housing. After another punishing report from the National Audit Office, it is looking increasingly like the grand project that is universal credit will be a disaster. 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...
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.
(Much more at link):
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/13/tories-hostile-not-just-immigrants
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