Shifts to the right

The modern problem of capricious illegality

A number of new followers and subscribers have decided to read what I have to say here on The Endless Chain. To them and everyone, I extend a warm welcome. This post is unrestricted.

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In 1979, I was 17 years of age and about to enter my second year of sixth-form studies at school, before I would go on to university in the autumn of the next year. The month was May and it was an auspicious time of my life. Not just of mine, but of those who were busy studying alongside me, and of those who, alongside me, lived at that time in the United Kingdom. If we had but known it, it was the dawn of an era whose demise is not quite yet in the offing, but may just, nonetheless, be on the horizon. And whether that is a good or a bad thing, remains yet to be seen.

Image, the author, aged 17.

There was a schoolmaster of mine, John Clay, who taught history and geography, was a decent slow bowler at cricket, was tall, gangly, bore the appearance of an eternal schoolboy, tended to facial acne and was an enthusiast of anything to do with railways. He was also a political thinker and had himself stood for election as a local councillor (without success) for the Liberal party. He was a great proponent of proportional representation, especially, so the cynic might wrily say, because the then, and current, system of first past the post, or FPTP as it’s known, tends to disadvantage the smaller parties, of which the Liberals were, and are, one.¹

With a general election pending for the country as a whole, John Clay had the idea of organising a mock election for the pupils of Woodhouse Grove School. Interest was solicited from myself and two older boys who were preparing for their A-levels (and probably had better things to do). For the Liberal party, David Dabbs stepped up to the hustings, the Labour candidate was Andrew Davidson, and I stood as the contender for the Conservative party. We had about ten days to get on with it, so I enquired with the Conservative office in my local constituency about policy matters, and they kindly gave me some materials like stickers and posters, with which to promote the Conservative message.

What I didn’t especially do was actually look at the policies of my opponents. Clay organised three hustings, one for each of us, and, in a schoolboyishly (I was, after all, a schoolboy) jocular fashion, I heckled my Labour opponent at his, the first one. This reaped a reprimand from Clay, who emphasised that, even in jostling for the reins of power, candidates should consider the wisdom of acting like monkeys. John Clay had not, nor had anyone at that point, witnessed some of the excesses to which we have since seen the world’s politicians descend in terms of behavioural impropriety.

The British government at the time was a Labour administration under James Callaghan and the candidate putting up the challenge to him, in the real election, was none other than the formidable Mrs Margaret Thatcher. So, if I knew nothing about what Labour and the Liberals stood for, what were her policies, and by extension mine?

The Conservative message in 1979 was axed on two principal thrusts: first, the citizen should decide themselves where they want to pay their tax. That’s a cute sell, but the policy was ultimately to reduce income taxation and place a greater emphasis on value-added tax (VAT), which is known as goods and services tax (GST) elsewhere in the world. This, as I would come to learn, is a regressive tax, which means that the more you earn, the less you pay, or more accurately, the lower the rate of tax paid becomes to the amount of income earned.² This means that VAT is pernicious for those with low incomes, and favours the high earner. Learning this fact turned me away from the policy I had put forward in the mock election.

The second main thrust was that government has no business in being in business: as Ronald Reagan would put it two years later: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” The Conservatives would embark upon a raft of denationalisations, or privatisations, of major industries, wrestle the trades unions into submission, and lighten the burden of red tape and official oversight of industry and trade so that businesspeople could get on with the business of business, and government could reduce the ranks of its civil service and alleviate the tax burden weighing down on the hapless population. This, in all events, was the theory.

Businesses compete in a marketplace and always strive for efficiency and product improvement over the competition. If they can do it with soap powder, they can do it with the water that flows through household taps, so went the argument. When private companies get transferred to other private companies, there are two ways to do the valuation: one is to value the company’s earnings potential, by looking at what it earns now and has earned in the recent past. That tells you what it will likely earn in the new owners’ hands. Or you can value the individual assets that make up the company, which is more appropriate if it’s making losses. The real estate, the plant and machinery and the office equipment are all worth something, so you inventory them and come to a total price. But what do you do with a nationalised industry?

I’m not an expert in the field, but the criticism of privatisations that has been emerging for some time now is that the valuations were inaccurate, pure guesswork or even manipulated; in any case they were generally low and, deliberately so, in order to encourage a low flotation price, so that the new government’s announcement of a nation of shareholders could be realised. Whether there was wholehearted belief in government ranks in this nation of shareholders slogan, the nation’s shareholders would soon sell up their holdings, make a quick killing on the stock market as the price generally rose after the IPO, and the shares would end up in the hands of pension funds and other corporate investors. Ultimately the aim of democratising stockholdings was not achieved.

The government’s ideas of product improvement and efficiency as practised in day-to-day commerce failed in part to materialise as well. Because what was privatised was in fact a monopoly industry (gas, water, telephones, railways, power, etc.), the tendency crept in to not give a hoot about efficiency or quality, but to deliver the services with a heavy dollop of like it or lump it attitude, the very purported reason they had been denationalised in the first place. This led to a realisation that self-regulation tends to non-regulation the more monopolistic the sector served by a company tends to become, and that would then turn me away from the second thrust of the manifesto that I had defended in 1979. Doesn’t leave me much, eh?

It was nonetheless a manifesto that in that year won the favour of the British people, and, in what John Clay as the returning officer described as a not entirely typical constituency, being a private English educational institution, it won the favour of the pupils of Woodhouse Grove School, and I was returned as its mock member of parliament. Very soon, attentions turned back to the serious matters at hand and to preparations for what we knew would be our futures, and the mock election and its results were quickly forgotten. In some respects, we might instead have dwelt somewhat longer on that mock election: for the changes that were about to sweep not just the UK but the entire world would have a far more determining influence on our futures than such a petty matter as an A-level.

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A-levels are the British exams that will gain you entry to a university or college. The argument is that the better your A-level grades are, the more choice of tertiary education institution you will have. That is true, although there are some choices which may seem disingenuous, such as that some subjects are best taught at little-known institutions whereas (in my time, anyway) Oxford was certainly not the best university at which to read medicine, but people did so simply because it was Oxford. How true or otherwise these considerations are, when you’re 18 years of age taking your actual A-levels, all eyes are forward: you want the grades, you want the university you’ve chosen, and you want a life.

I will never complain that I didn’t get to choose where I spend my tax: I’m not sure how much better off I would be right now if I had not paid VAT over my lifetime, but it would likely be a surprising amount. And, although I never was a stockholder of a privatised industry, I cannot complain that I never had the chance. In the end, I never had the money to wager a gamble on the stock market, and that is in fact what it seemed to me to be in the end. I couldn’t know that the stocks were generally undervalued upon IPO, that a gain was almost guaranteed and that it was easy money for those prepared to go through the rigmarole of filling in the subscription form.

As for all the civil servants being shed over the years to save the British people having to pay heaps of needless salaries to pen-pushing officials in backroom offices across the country, one hopes the numbers were reduced by natural wastage, rather than swathes of redundancies. I can’t complain: I never worked as a civil servant. Someone did, but that’s not my worry.

What affects me a little more than working for the civil service is the acts that corporate entities may have engaged in as a result of the relaxing of regulatory stringencies by the government, although, in the here and now, I cannot actually quantify them. I never managed any such corporations, and I was never employed by them. I may have rendered legal services to them, and may even have rendered translation services to them, or to their legal counsel.

In that sense, the huge surge in neoliberalism that began on that day in May 1979 in Britain, and two years later in January 1981 in the USA has nothing to do with me. I am not responsible. I bear no blame. The A-levels that I sat in 1980 did not fit me for deciding such things or manipulating or coercing anyone. They fit me solely to become part of a gargantuan mechanism, whose baseplate was set down by Mrs Thatcher and Mr Reagan and whoever else had a part in the building of the fundaments of the system under which most of us now live—neoliberalism. I can do nothing to turn clocks back and, even if I could, and even if I could position myself on that fateful day in May 1979 and could announce to Woodhouse Grove School, its pupils and the world beyond that we were in that second embarking upon a wrong move, one that would bring riches to some and death and destruction to others, who would believe me? Who would listen for even a second to the rantings of a deluded idiot? No, instead they would say, “Let us walk up the yellow brick road, which leads to the City of Emeralds, and let us ourselves aspire to being wizards of Oz.”

We can say with certainty that what Britain did in 1979 and what America would do in 1981 was shift to the right, if we can say that Conservative and Republican politics are on the right-hand side of the spectrum, and Labour and the Democratic party are on the left-hand side of the spectrum. I spell this out lest there be any misconception as to what these terms mean, left and right. Because sometimes the right gets referred to as the other left and, for all I know, it can be that the left occasionally gets referred to as the other right. And terminology can be confusing for those who are unfamiliar with it.

That day in May 1979 was a happy day in the Vincent household. Not only were mother and father proud of the mock political victory of their youngest son at school, but they were positively over the moon at seeing the back of Mr Callaghan and the arrival at 10 Downing Street of Mrs Thatcher. “We will never again have a Labour government,” crowed my father, and he was right.

That much I must grant him: we have not since that day in 1979 ever had another Labour government. That, of course, requires a certain qualification, because you will ask yourself, What, then were the governments between 1997 and 2010? Mr Blair and Mr Brown? Were they not Labour? Yes, they were, nominally, Labour, but they were by no standard the Labour of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. They even coined the term New Labour, although they didn’t change the name of the party. But Tony Blair sought to strike out in new directions, away from the more deeply socialist ideas of his predecessors, like Wilson and, especially, Michael Foot. When I visited my brother in 1998 and the topic turned to the day’s politics, I asked him what he thought of the Labour prime minister, Tony Blair. He replied in terms that were pretty much on all our minds at the time: “We’ve never had such a good Conservative government.”

Labour no longer calls itself New but we await with bated breath to see what the new (lower case) Labour government will turn out to be in the meat. The appearance of the dish, as it sits steaming fresh on its trencher, is presently that the new Labour government is not radically different from its Conservative forerunner, except it has produced somewhat less sleaze (these are early days) and what little there has been amounts thus far only to financial improprieties, which I’m sure will be resolved or find the edge of a carpet at some imminent juncture. As for my father, I needed to pinch myself when, much, much later in life, he bemoaned the fact that so many essential services had been privatised. “The railways are an essential form of communications, and should never be in private hands.” If Maggie herself had said it, I couldn’t have been more stunned. But, at the time, as now, he was right: in the sense of Labour policy as it existed in the 1970s (worker representation, nationalisation of essential industries, assistance to those who cannot assist themselves, a fair distribution of national wealth, due taxation of those able to bear the burden), there has not been another Labour government since 4 May 1979.

What we now know as fact is that voting for one today will not get you any of what you got for voting Labour in the 1970s. There is talk of maybe renationalising Thames Water PLC (Keir will get talked out it), but the widespread privatisation of essential services by both Conservative and Labour administrations over the past forty odd years is not going to see any rapid reversal. There is a lack of political will, a lack of perceived benefit, and a lack of the power to do so: governmental power no longer lies in government, nor even, the legal theorist might imagine, in parliament; much of it lies in lobby groups and, to be frank, lobbyist is pretty much a byword these days for corruption and bribery.

That is a palpable change that has taken place in these 45 years: there is now much more widespread acceptance of the maxim if you scratch our backs, we’ll scratch yours, and a perception, once only commonplace in less salubrious quarters than the corridors of western power, that no machinery moves until it is liberally greased. Exactly how much influence is wielded by interests outside parliament over the business of parliament, in Britain or elsewhere, is outside my ken, but is not quite outside that of an organisation called Transparency International, whose main preoccupation is to gauge the likelihood that, for any particular decision to be taken by an official instance in a given country, persuasion is needed by means of a bribe.

In its Corruption Perceptions Index, they accord points scores to each country, and then rank them in a list. The UK has a decent score of 71, which means, a little like with weather forecasting, that it won’t rain. Small differences in points scores don’t mean that much for the average umbrella-carrier. When you get down to a score below 43 (the average this year), there, you should reckon on a shower or two. The US’s score is currently 69, so on a par with the UK and many European countries. What is not entirely clear is whether the index includes consideration of input corruption at the level of government. By input corruption I mean corruption at the stage of formulating law (output corruption is where the law is applied, by officials or the courts, for instance). Safe to say is that input corruption is rife, if we consider the jocularly dubbed horse trading that goes on when wheedling policy measures through parliament.

Impractical though pure principle can sometimes be as a policy solution, it was, oddly, one of the things that was drummed into me during the time I was at that school: to not compromise that which is right in deference to that which you believe to be wrong. As a result of this shift, elections, such as that conducted on 4 May 1979, are no longer of such tumultuous effect as they then were: regardless of the vote (distorted as it is by FPTP), the policies that will be enacted during the resulting government’s term are by far more dependent on the influence purchased at parliamentary level than by the votes cast at the ballot box. In that sense, there are far more mock elections these days than just the one we had at Woodhouse Grove in 1979.

Shifts to the right

I keep hearing that there are shifts to the right. Having shifted to the right in 1979 and not having shifted enormously leftward again in either 1997 or 2024, one now has to start redefining what it is that one means with a shift to the right. We know that, in 1979, the shift to the right meant less income tax and more VAT. The regressive nature of the policy change explains overall Labour policy when it was in power 1997 to 2010: they generally reduced VAT, if on certain goods only. By contrast, Conservative administrations have, on the whole, tended to increase the rate of VAT.

Regulation/deregulation is a matter that is difficult to keep pace with, since it is subdivided according to sector, and even specialists rely on sector monitors, trade associations and specialist lawyers to keep track of every last requirement. In sum, however, we can say that both higher VAT and less industry regulation constitute shifts to the right. In 1979, I identified these as Conservative policies, but not especially as shifts to the right, since the differences between Labour and Conservative were not that great.

They are still not that great, perhaps even less so now than in 1979, if only because they’ve both shifted to the right in equal measure. So, what does a shift to the right mean in today’s terms and what does it mean when we look not just at Britain but at the whole world?

Brash politics

Politics is like the circus, in many ways. The circus was recently in my town and, one day, I followed a truck with a loud hailer meandering down the road announcing the fact. In the past, that might be done with a parade, of elephants and caged tigers, jugglers and playful clowns. Now it’s a truck with a loud hailer. But, when a circus comes, perhaps not according to a fixed time schedule, people need to know, otherwise they may miss it. The same goes for politics. It’s rare to sleep through an entire election process anywhere, but politicians, like circus parades, need to get noticed, and now’s the time if it’s an election. Questions have been raised about Donald Trump’s electioneering tactics, which adhere firmly to the maxim that any publicity is good publicity, so he tends to hog the headlines with his surprising statements. He is right wing, and he bears some resemblance to Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, and other notably right-wing politicians, so brash politics does tend to be right wing, in your face one might say. Mrs Thatcher, and even Mr Sunak, were less brash, it must be said—more conservative, one might say.

Immigration

This is a subject fraught with difficulty. In its bare bones, it means going to live in another country, but in recent years it has come to mean a lot of things. In terms of the welcome that a foreigner can expect in their new country, and how the fact of their migration plays into policy in the new country, the ease of integration and assimilation, and the threat of eviction, should things turn politically sour. In 1973, when Britain joined the Common Market, emigration was hailed as a great new opportunity. At the time, there were only nine member states, but one great selling point for the move (there was a referendum to approve the measure after the fact) was the chances of employment and cultural exchange that this membership opened up.

The European Union, as it is now called, is founded on the four fundamental freedoms: free movement of persons, capital, goods and services, of which the first is basically the only one that affects individuals, rather than trading entities. Now, of course, the UK has withdrawn from the Union, but it still has 27 members. Yet, even among these countries, one can encounter resistence to migration. It is sub-classified: as legal migration and illegal migration, the former being where you know before travelling that the place you are going to is somewhere you are entitled to be or, failing that, where you have reasonable confidence that the authorities will recognise your right to stay there at least for the duration of the circumstances which impel your departure from home; the latter is where you have no such certainty and/or are refused the right to settle. That is to say, those who migrate on the strength of their purported right to asylum or as refugees do not do so illegally until such time as the authorities before whom a claim to asylum or refugee status is laid definitively turn it down. How quickly they do that is uncertain; it can take a long time.

Asylum is for those whose existence is imperilled if they remain where they are. They may be politically undesirable, or simply gay: there is some quality about them that is unobjectionable to the country fled to that endangers the subject where he is. Refugee status tends to arise from circumstances such as armed conflict, where people flee the scene of the fighting. The reasons in both cases are predicated on physical danger, and a physical danger can be a reason arising externally, from war, for instance, or internally, from police repression, rioting, genocide, or a law against homosexuality. What they may not be predicated on is hunger, or other material want. That is due to policy and not to logic. Logic would demand that, if one’s existence is threatened by famine or by a collapse in the local economy, one should be able to rely on citing that to secure a safe environment in which to seek new opportunity in another place, but that will not work, unless the applicant already has the means to support themselves, and that is counterintuitive.

But, even where the intended qualifications to lay claim to asylum or refugee status are fully met, large bodies of citizens in the countries that such applicants flee to are predisposed against their arrival, regardless of the grounds on which they embark upon their journey. Migrants are simply a problem. At best they encounter political opposition; at worst, the refuges that they get housed in are attacked, those who settle and establish businesses are firebombed, and they might at any time be subject to abuse for simply walking down the street. A Black American friend of mine passed through Frankfurt airport in Germany earlier this week and noted to me that he didn’t see a single other Black person. So, what? Maybe there were very few Black people travelling that day. It’s something you notice when you’re Black, but not when you’re white: the overwhelming incongruity of a monoracial scene. The problem is not the Black man noticing the absence of other Black people, but the reaction of some white people when they notice the presence of Black people. Interestingly, a recent report identifies a restricted view emerging in Europe as to race. The obvious whiteness of the EU’s politics seemingly goes unremarked upon, and Europe is tending more to racial xenophobia.

So, is immigration a right-wing matter? When I was young, back before even that mock election, we were accustomed to using racial slurs, and inventing jokes whereby the immigrant was the fall guy. I hope I matured. I was at one time in a WhatsApp group of guys whom I had known at that school, and I immediately saw blatant signs of racial bigotry in the group, even all these years on; I left very quickly, but was disappointed that some of my scholastic cohorts had matured at a slower pace than I hope I had.

Much of the non-vocal reaction to immigration (and even much of it that is just vocal) comes as a breach of the law. In many places, it is unlawful to shout racial hatred (even to call Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman coconuts—dark on the outside, but white in the middle), whilst at the same time political parties there seek to restrict the right to settle as an immigrant, and engage in questionably legal manoeuvres to intercept migrants before reaching their territory proper.

Yet, what is migration, and what is it that renders it illegal? It’s trite to say that mankind has migrated since ever it came into existence: were it not for migration, all of mankind would still be on the continent of Africa. So, everyone migrated at some time, even if it was many generations back, for you personally (or unless you are reading this in Africa). It is a reality of the world that people believe they can stem by simply not liking it. In the Middle Ages, it was competent for a court of law to try prosecutions of animals. This was no farce, these were serious proceedings, and verdicts of guilt (generally the animal put up no cogent defence) were handed down, as if the prisoner were a real person. So imaginative can human beings be in inventing realities that run counter to reality. The market forces in which so much faith is placed, whereby labour will naturally go to where it can best be employed, are denied in terms of migration, and when the underdogs do manage to secure work in some foreign land, they are exploited mercilessly. People create the concept of illegal migration by, first, creating the notion of borders and, second, creating the fiction of non-harmful behaviour that is then split artificially into two types, which are otherwise substantively indistinguishable, being (a) lawful and (b) unlawful.

In all events, migration is not just a right-wing matter: the new Labour government is not about to open its arms to fleeing refugees. It won’t execute the previous government’s policy of wanting to rehouse refugees in Rwanda, but it’s not exactly open to housing more of them in Britain; because its supporters would not support that, and Labour doesn’t want to lose its support, because it has less of that than its number of parliamentary seats would indicate (another failing of FPTP).

You can find racial slurs emitted from the mouths of left-wingers and right-wingers and centrists alike. If they don’t utter them in front of you, they likely utter them in private WhatsApp groups. The danger posed by immigration as an incentive to start supporting right-wing groups does not lie in the prevalence of racial prejudice, because much of that is closely monitored on a public scale and does get prosecuted, even at what can be seen as a pernickety level.

Let us suppose that attacking immigration is a right-wing policy: that’s what they say, in respect of Hungary, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, the US, Canada, Slovakia. What does that then mean? That their governments will repulse illegal immigration; but aren’t they doing that already? I mean, illegal immigration is illegal, and breaches of the law must be remedied, is that not so? But I can hardly think these governments are considering legalising the firebombing of kebab shops, or allowing racist chants in their high streets. That all sounds a little extreme, but what is the shift to the right on immigration? Well, I suppose we will recognise it when we see it: forced deportations are one possibility; a repeat of Kristallnacht might be another. That would be a big thing, but that cannot be anywhere on the cards, surely? How many shifts to the right need there be before a repeat of Kristallnacht no longer seems such a big thing? How many shifts make a lurch to the right?

In other words, there are policy measures that would be recognisably right wing, and yet we are in many cases across the world in situations that, in 1979, one would have hoped would be soundly denounced as unacceptably extreme. Wikipedia offers a run-down of racism in the British Conservative party, which starts off, somewhat optimistically in my own mind, by saying that “There have been incidents of racism in the Conservative Party since at least 1964,” thereby drawing something of a gargantuan veil over Britain’s colonial past.

But the simple fact is that animosity towards foreigners is not restricted to the right wing. Perhaps it’s not even restricted to whites. If immigration poses a challenge before which anybody needs to struggle, with their inner conscience and their sense of right and their sense of justice, and in reconciling colonial history and enslavement with the betterment enjoyed in the modern world, in gaining a sense of proportion and a sense of positivity and achieving equanimity with our fellow man, then we should be grateful that one central plank of government policymaking offers this chance of our own intellectual improvement: we can achieve far more doing something about aircraft noise than criminalising those who just want a better life.

Be all that as it may, immigration and the extreme right wing are indelibly associated. So, what will the right wing do? What will they actually do if they get into power? I mean the Nazi party. To what have we become so inured that it no longer seems extreme? To shrinkflation? Price-gouging? Zero-hours contracts? Colossal environmental pollution? The melting of the western Antarctic ice shelf? Bankers’ bonuses? Cronyism? Partygate? Political donations? Israel policy and the Gaza Strip? Russian invasions of foreign sovereign territories? What no longer shocks?

Because I will venture, if you won’t, that whatever shift to the right means in the modern venacular, well, in the words of Al Jolson, You ain’t seen nothing yet, and if that’s what you want to see, if those are the lengths to which you want political leaders to go and the measures you want enacted, then to there is where we are all headed. Leftists stare in disbelief—at least this one does—at the words shift to the right, which seem now to appear in newspaper headlines on a daily basis. Even the EU President, Ursula Von der Leyen, is subtlely moving to the right. It seems commonly to be thought that by, subtlely or otherwise, shifting to the right, one assuages the desires of the right and one retains the support that right-leaning members of one’s own political movement threatened to withdraw unless there be change in the policy area in question. Whether the movement loses support on the left, then, is all a question of political gamble.

But such concessions to the right don’t always work that way, as we see with Mr Trump. In 2016, he wanted to build a wall (that Mexico would pay for, wouldn’t you know it?) along the US border in the south. In the end, Mr Biden has built more wall than Mr Trump ever did, and Mexico has not paid a penny piece; but now Mr Trump’s rhetoric is no longer about walls, it is a tirade of denigrating insults that stop short, but very short, of launching into racist invective. That is the state that we have come to in 45 years. I do somehow wonder how Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech would be received today, how many of the sharp intakes of breath, then, would be replaced by howls of support, now.

I said that I was unable to make any impact over my lifetime on the rate of VAT in the United Kingdom, and that the deregulation of industry was a matter that has been, and still is, well outside my sphere of influence. But, below me as I write is blank space. So, I have a choice of what to do next: a blank canvas, if you will.

I could continue writing in the same vein as Enoch Powell deployed in his speech. I could try to whip up racial tensions, hatred, and condone acts of violence, whether by members of the public or by members of the government, against immigrants: it is my right, as far as I understand it to be enshrined in the ethos of Mr Musk. Or I could be nonplussed and resign myself to the maxim that what has been has been, and what will be will be: abrogate all and any responsibility for all and any acts carried out by all and any persons against all and any other persons. I am a rock, I am an island: unassailable and solitary. But I can’t.

If the world can change its view on immigration, the extreme right is a spent force. The immigration question is its life’s breath, the oxygen that keeps it alive. Its knuckledusters and its puffer jackets and its cropped hairstyle and its jackboots will all serve as naught if the immigration question is banished from its minds. It’s a question that will never be banished from the Earth, because immigration, emigration and migration are in the very psyche of humankind. Without it, our race, our one single race, would never had flourished beyond the stage of hunter-gatherers.

Immigration has challenged our ingenuity and our inventiveness, to learn how to survive and to persist in climes that are strange to us and to confront dangers and hazards, presented by the natural world and by the Earth itself, by one means, and one means only: that, as a species, acting in mutual trust, we have been able to join forces to confront our common enemy, and in so doing to abandon any animosity we felt for each other. Together, and only together, we can combat a bear, ice and snow, sweltering tropical heat, or poisonous snakes, in circumstances in which each of us alone would perish. A Russian woman recently told me that, in Siberia, they never lock their doors. Their winters dive to a cold of minus 60, and their summers, short as they are, surge to 35 degrees. Life is hard, brutal, short and uncompromising; they don’t steal from each other into the bargain. Perhaps integrating as an incomer in Siberia is nonetheless difficult. Deciding whether or not to welcome someone into your community as a trusted fellow-citizen can cause hesitation. But excluding them simply because of where they come from or because of the pressing ground why they are even there defies any reason, and comes down to simple bad manners.

My life’s journey took me a long way to the left. To conceiving of property as theft and communism as the natural state of our existence. Not because I was seduced by any political mantra, or because any particular political party could offer me betterment in greater amount than anyone else, but because I arrived there for want of a datum. A datum, a determinant line that tells you the point below which no one in consideration will fall. It’s a landscaping term, and a statistical term: you could call it a year zero. The time when everything began, from which all rights and obligations stem. The right to live somewhere, like in Israel, or my house; the right to rule, based on authority that stems from time immemorial (before the year 1189); my right to exclude someone, from Israel, or from my house; my right to end someone’s life; my right to cross a line on a map; my ability to call another person my friend, or my enemy. And none of these things has a datum. They are all constructs of law, the rules that we make up as we go along.

I live in my home unhindered because, until now at least, no one has challenged my rights as recorded in the kadaster, which is an official document of the Flemish government, which is a duly authorised subdivision of the Kingdom of Belgium, whose government invited Leopold of Saxe-Gotha in 1830 to become its king after it had successfully thrown off the hegemony of King William II of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in a bloody revolution in that year, and there we have it: a potential point of contest for the validity of the kadaster recording my ownership of this house: non-recognition of the revolt by the Southern Netherlands against their masters in The Hague. This one is more or less settled, but what of Sudan? Ukraine? Western Sahara? Who are all these states, in dispute with one another, placing citizens of, I know not where, in peril and jeopardy?

National and international disputes may stem from disagreements between nations but, ultimately, they all stem from the existence of the nation. There will be those who smile and even laugh at me at this juncture and who tutt into their coffee as I tell them that nation states are the source of all evil. It is indeed tantamout to unthinkable to unthink the nation state out of existence, and this I will concede. But, two hundred years ago, as short a timespan as that, it was precisely the nation state that itself was unthinkable across large tracts of our modern world. What the nation state has done for us is to legalise the mafia: it has given mankind the ultimate structure under which to engage in criminal behaviour, and to legitimise all otherwise heinous acts carried out under its aegis. And in so doing, its subjects are encouraged not to dwell all too long on the true meaning behind the word legality, and blithely to pursue the nation state’s policy as were it the word of God Himself. No, slightly more seriously than even that. The rule of law that was quoted to me at an event at my house not two weeks ago is, sorry to say, nothing more and nothing less than application of the law according to the law itself. It is a self-fulfilling aspiration, albeit nonetheless a lofty one.

Reasoning my way to the left in this manner may yet prove unhelpful, in terms of putting food in my mouth or paying my Internet bill. But I shan’t regret it. Because I think it’s right, that drawing year zeros in the sand to justify our position on anything is likewise to build castles of sand. And constructing arguments, however intellectual or scientific they may purport to be, in order to justify a rank, spiteful dislike of other people will never contain itself within the reasonability of the man on the Clapham omnibus—if it is even contained by that. That is why we must halt these shifts to the right and reassess, here and now, where we came from such that a further shift to the right was even possible, and ask ourselves: did we reason our way to this position of prejudice, or were we transported here by others, who goad us in order to win our favour for their ulterior purpose? And how can I return to where my equanimity accords with my constitution? Like immigration, which can, at will, be lawful or unlawful, so a hammer can, at will, likewise be lawful or unlawful. A hammer is a legally permissible tool, provided it is used constructively; if used destructively, it becomes a weapon, and therefore is proscribed by law. The same must be said for so-called free speech: use that gift, which is mankind’s alone, constructively and all will harken unto your voice. If you choose to use it destructively, to nurture badness between people and peoples, then this should not be permissible.

If we cannot achieve this simple mental exercise, then the time at which we raise our hands in horror at where the extreme right has shifted to may be too late. If we are going to utter an ounce of conscience to our fellow man, then we must do so when our consciences are troubled at all, not once it has become impossible for our utterances even to be heard.

1. For instance, in the 2024 election in Britain, the winning party (Labour) attained a seat count of 411, or 68 per cent of the lower house, yet only 34 per cent of those casting a vote voted for that party. On the other hand, the Reform party received 14.3 per cent of the votes cast (just under half (42 per cent) of the number who voted for Labour), and achieved only 0.8 per cent of the seats (five in total).

2. For an item costing £100 on which there is a VAT charge of £25 (25 per cent), a man with an hourly wage of £25 pays one hour’s wage in tax. A man earning £50 an hour (twice as much) pays only a half-hour’s wage as tax. The tax regresses the more the taxpayer earns.