SOCIETY: The demands of citizenship
Who’s afraid of David Blunkett?
More gibbering foreign people
Fans of Olive have had a tough time of it recently, what with their favourite ploy — ‘crikey, see how he blind-sided the minister there, cor, ain’t he ever so civilised’ — being that bit more difficult to wheel out in the wake of Soham. For over that the shadow Home Secretary was every bit as silly and knee-jerk as any of his peers would have been, but still, he’s cleared the latest, low hurdle placed before him by David Blunkett. The Home Secretary is now set upon haring off after our recently(ish) arrived friends and jumping into their sitting rooms crying out, ‘you didn’t expect the elocution inquisition! No one expects the elocution inquisition!’ And no one supported it either: from the Telegraph up, every one was on their best behaviour and said what a dreadful idea this was. Though — and this was surely another splinter into the heart as far as his most fervent (no, that’s hardly the mot juste, his most languidly enthused) fans are concerned? — it’s a bit of a pity Oliver Letwin had to tick the Home Secretary orf for ‘thinking aloud’. This, apparently, being something David Blunkett should have left off on accepting his seals of office. This is one of those meaty parables however, with a lesson for just about everyone in it. Among other things, we need to realise why: David Blunkett isn’t a ‘racist’; ‘citizenship’ is a notion radically subversive of Tory notions of identity; and, most of all, this Home Secretary represents an even graver threat to the Conservative Party’s electoral base than does the Prime Minister.
Much like he’d like juries to be able to, it’s useful to have a gander at David Blunkett’s form on this touchiest of subjects. Since taking office, his pleasing little bromides have included reflections on how immigrants mustn’t be allowed to ‘swamp’ schools, how Britons of South Asian descent (as he most certainly didn’t delicately parse it) should confine themselves to each other, rather than reaching out to the sub-continent for arranged marriages, and, how immigrants need to be educated as to ‘norms of acceptability’. All hot stuff, but there’s no stopping the man — just today he opened up a fresh can of whoop-ass on actual-factual immigrants, offering the gem:
We are freeing countries of different religions and cultural backgrounds and making it possible for them [asylum seekers] to get back home and rebuild their countries. I have no sympathy whatsoever with young people in their twenties who do not get back home and rebuild their country and their families.
Leaving to one side the remarkably uniform benefit ‘Curzon’ Blunkett hopes we’re bringing to the rest of this great big ole and diverse planet of ours (you know — ‘here’s freedom chaps, as what we have in the West, go on, take it, you’ll love it’), what a great leap forward! So here we finally have it: asylum seekers, genuine asylum seekers are just as unwelcome as the ‘bogus’ ones Mr Blunkett used to affect to be so bothered by.
Of course, the logic of this is never followed through, for although the Home Secretary has at last admitted that the official drift of government policy is, they’re all as bad as each other, they’re clearly not. One suspects it will be some time before David Blunkett and his posse get down to the East End, Docklands to be specific, and tell all the city workers hailing originally from especially unfortunate bits of the 3rd world, go on, clear off — go and ‘rebuild’ your families.
Yet David Blunkett isn’t a racist, he is however, a determined Home Secretary entirely lacking in serious external or internal political opposition, and one who is hell-bent on changing the way you and me are supposed to live. The starting point — and the way ultimately that David Blunkett gets away with this whole agenda — is crime. Tonight saw a themed evening on BBC1 given over to crime. The link between crime and immigration is seldom referred to explicitly, but when ‘tougher’ measures towards any and every sort of immigration are contemplated ‘crime’ is always the immediate justification, pace the Home Secretary’s opinion that, ‘unless properly managed . . . migration can be perceived as a threat to community stability and good race relations’.
‘Community stability’, there’s a phrase for you, and all the time, we skirt round the issue the Home Secretary wants to flag up, but won’t, whatever The Guardian shrieks about him. For, just about, at a fairly extreme pinch, you can, at ever such a stretch, make out that what David Blunkett’s warning about is that his nebulous notion of ‘community stability’ might be endangered (which means what exactly?) because the aboriginal population might get a bit uppity. For cardinal truth number one is that immigrants qua immigrants aren’t the problem, it’s the reaction of lumpen whites to them. This, as I say, is the doxology Mr Blunkett has to intone to meet the test act of liberal opinion — what he’s really saying, and all too clearly, to the general public is, ‘don't worry, I know what you think is a prime cause of crime, and I’m not going to let any more cause in’.
But the thing is, what the public think about crime isn’t hugely useful — it certainly isn’t up to much as a reliable guide to public policy. Take that typical piece of self-inflated BBC puff, their crime night: as a centrepiece it had a survey of public attitudes to crime, which threw up the statistic that 55% of people think street crime has risen in the last six months. Which it hasn’t. Now part of the reason for this myth is that both broadcast and print media go out of their way to hype ‘crime’ as a social issue. Another problem is that both Tory and Labour politicians likewise have an alternating vested interest in contributing to this mania. They do this when it is — and brute statistics make this unavoidably true — the fear of crime that is destroying the quality of life for so many, rather than actual experience of it. Statesmanship, and responsible reporting among journalists, would tilt towards putting crime in its proper perspective, but sadly not. And so David Blunkett proceeds with an agenda that though its starts with immigrants will end up being applied to everyone.
Shared participation
Or, why you can’t ‘abdicate responsibility and retreat into the private realm’. The charmingly old-fashioned way David Blunkett attracted the latest, keenly sought headlines about, oh, what’ll we have this time, let’s plump for . . . making Indians [sic] speak English in their own homes, for their own good (natch), was by contributing an essay (‘Integration with Diversity: Globalisation and the Renewal of Democracy and Civil Society’) to a Foreign Policy Centre yawnfest going under the name of Rethinking Britishness. Little do they know, but this is exactly what the present Home Secretary, with all these frightening little quotes, is busily engaged in doing. Being Home Secretary also has certain implications for the relationship between thought and deed. In a phrase, citizenship is about ‘shared participation - from the neighbourhood to national elections’. The key concept here is citizenship, for it is precisely this alien notion that David Blunkett wants to introduce into British life, and thereby undermine traditional notions of the self, and ones relations to others and the state. In short, this is going to be all about the short of nannyish ‘sharing’ where baby can’t say no.
Citizenship is a terrible, demanding thing — nothing like the easy and realistic status of subjecthood that the Home Secretary is attempting to subvert and eventually replace. A subject acknowledges the reality of state power — which is reasonable enough as he hasn’t a lot of choice in the matter, so it’s an honest notion of the self, which is good — and he gives up to it, well, whatever little the state historically has asked of him. For those of us born here, this has traditionally amounted to next to nothing — an oath here, a rising to our feet here, and that’s it. No ‘values’ or ‘republican virtues’ to subscribe to; and no paper compact to sign up to, on fear of dread penalty if we decline. From recently acquired Britons a more explicit oath of loyalty has been required — but loyalty to what? To a state hitherto unequalled in its undemanding nature. Being British hasn’t meant you’ve had to do anything — all that is set to change if David Blunkett gets his way. Tories ought to know where they stand in this fight.
In his FPC essay, the Home Secretary engagingly spends much of his time plugging his worthless little tome, Politics and Progress, because that’s where previously he has addressed the
misunderstanding on the liberal Left in particular of the need to maintain stability and security in order to protect basic individual freedoms and liberty, rather than allow them to be eroded.
Vaguely thrillingly this come under the sub-heading, ‘Security and social order’, but to move on is to realise the monumental repositioning Mr Blunkett has pulled off. All the Prime Minister did as shadow Home Secretary was offer up random symptoms of Liberal Authoritarianism for the purposes of vote-harvesting. Mr Blunkett is the one who has been able — willing — to produced the ideological framework necessary to systematically implement and extend this pernicious doctrine. And remember, unlike all previous notions of the individual democratic governments have conceived in Britain, this one is steadily equipping itself with the means to enforce its fantasies. This is because this fantasy is peculiarly dependent upon the very act of coercion, here rebranded ‘shared participation’, to make it itself good. It is precisely through making the people ‘share’ in their common citizenship that David Blunkett believes he makes this citizenship good.
The press fuss was garnered by the efficient tease that immigrants, and the example chosen were the naughty ‘Asian British’, should speak English at home. So doing
helps overcome the schizophrenia which bedevils generational relationships. In as many as 30% of Asian British households, according to the recent citizenship survey, English is not spoken at home.
Now there are lots of things we could (in English, obviously) say about this, not least that this statistic proves to be entirely fictive, but that’s not what should have Tories standing up on their chairs and waving their Countryside March route maps at the Home Secretary. No, what should bother us is that even were this statistic not merely true, but a gross under-estimate of what brown Britons were getting up to in the privacy of their own homes, so what? What possible business could it be of David Blunkett’s, still less the government man (for what point is there in the Home Secretary identifying a problem if he intends to leave it, er, unattended?) And lo, Tory Britain, even the Telegraph, managed to grasp this pretty basic point. But, but, but . . . is this tolerating a vice as far as we’re concerned, or is it [gulp] some form of morally diseased libertarianism to argue that, really, a Pakistan gentleman’s Bradford terraced house is his Punjabi fort? No. Preventing the Home Secretary from regulating the Britishness of new Britons isn’t due to either disinterest in what they’re up to, still less, approbation for it — it’s because we need to provide resistance to the idea that David Blunkett should have any notion of Britishness for anyone to sign up to. And that, to repeat onto hoarse silence, is because, what goes for ‘them’ will come for us too.
In its own way, this was an amusing joke of an essay, and I suspect Mr Blunkett cast out the gags not entirely sure what the media would pick up on to give him those headlines. Perhaps in advance of publication he thought that this would be the line that did it:
Accepted norms hundreds of years ago in this country, but now rejected, remain acceptable from [sic] particular cultures of varying religions. This is why Pim Fortuyn, the leader of the Libertarian Right movement in the Netherlands before his assassination in the Spring of 2002 had a point to make about the clash of modernity with long held cultural traditions - but not of course the solution he offered.
Bit unfair that on Pim, and suggestive of a fair degree of ignorance about what he actually intended to do with non-white Dutchmen, which, of course, was make them sign up to ‘Dutch values’ — you know, all that tolerant, multi-cultural bilge. We were presented with this squib in the context of the Home Secretary’s belief that there is
a continuing tension between modernity and the cultural practices of some of those entering highly advanced countries. This is not true, of course, for the majority of those entering the more developed world, but it is for those who, because of education or geography, find themselves catapulted into effectively different centuries. They are making a journey in the space of a few weeks or months, which it has taken us hundreds of years to make.
And hence action. Otherwise people, alright, immigrants, just never will get with the project, and, I think we’re meant in addition to believe, that’s their loss as much as it is ours. Mind you, it would be a serious falling off in etiquette if any of these coves pronounced that they were signing up to ‘British’ or ‘Western’ values, clearly we’ve transcended that (unlike the sorry Mr Fortuyn), but whatever our plane of bliss is called, you’d be better be on board, or else. In the case of immigrants, they simply won’t get in, but for those of us stuck here, it’s re-education time. Or as Mr Blunkett reminds us about the work he, as Education Secretary, has already done: ‘until 2002, we had not taught citizenship in our schools’. Alas, poor improved children, this deficiency is now being remedied — and which Tory voice was loudest in opposition? Which was even raised?
It is not possible to overstate the threat that David Blunkett represents to the British way of life, for what he is trying to do is replace what has just happened, with his delusional mixture of what he feels ought to have happened, and what should now be the case. Moreover, unlike the old reality, this is a reality that you’re going to have to sign up to in school, when you become British, and eventually? God knows where.
[W]e also need to face the fact that to protect democracy, we must strengthen it. This is not about returning to a 19th century form of Parliamentary representation, and therefore relying solely on accountability through the ballot box. It is more fundamental than that. We need to engage people with participative democracy, so that they are part of the process.
This is not a programme to protect or preserve ‘democracy’, it is an effort to transform it. Call David Blunkett an ‘authoritarian’ if you will, but a far more accurate rendering of his politics would be ‘radical populist’ — the sort of communitarian who, now that he has access to the levers of the state, fully intends that you will ‘participate’ in your community. There is some seriously heavy leftist stuff going down here — consider only the Home Secretary’s proclaimed belief that, ‘people want to be active in civil society, sharing in the governance of their own communities of geography or interest’. Wait till you find out which of those it turns out you belong to.
The Tory danger
On the surface, most of Mr Blunkett’s essay is the usual waffle that left-liberal politicians spout on matters of immigration and identity. As one painful example, we’re solemnly assured of all the (unenumerated) wonders mass immigration has done for Britain, coupled to a determination that it shouldn’t be allowed to do us a whit more good like that. Heavens, this is such a consensus that it’s equally as much official, unthinking Conservative doctrine too. That is exactly why David Blunkett represents such a danger for the Tory party — he’s breaking out beyond this consensus. The old, unspoken party compact that mass immigration was, if not a vast social mistake, then something we certainly won’t be having any more of, is being circumvented by this Home Secretary. His new agenda transforms the debate by offering a regime that, to begin with chiefly immigrants will find uncomfortable, and precisely because of that an all too large proportion of Tory voters (and elected representatives) will be taken with it, for if there’s nothing wrong with ‘Britishness’, what could possibly be wrong with obliging people who have come to this country to be just so?
Much like the Christian notion that one can only truly do a good act by being freely able to choose do so (i.e. being made to do something ‘good’ negates its higher moral purpose), the very act of making a living, breathing individual sign up for some absurd, Crickian idea of what being British entails, then and there negates the very Britishness we have all known and loved.
That fat creep Keith Vaz said of David Blunkett, ‘if this was a Conservative Home Secretary he would have been asked to apologise by now’. In truth, a sighted Labour Home Secretary would have found himself in bother sharpish too. There is a feeling, infra dig as it is to hold this up for examination, that at some very profound level it must be preposterous to even imply that a blind man could be guilty of racism. What David Blunkett needs to be accused of — and what Tories have to know why they should do this — is an attempt to replace subjects made by history with citizens made in his own rational, time-trapped image. This shouldn’t be a difficult one for us.
Christopher Montgomery is publisher of ERO
, September 18, 2002 09:06 AM