David Goodhart
How many new friends does Cameron need to win?
Here at Prospect we eschew the wearisome political cynicism of our age and look forward to the election with a whistle and a skip. Like all national elections it is a festival of democracy—a chance for the country to talk to itself about how to cut the deficit (and whether a hung parliament would make it harder). We have sneaked in with an early “election special” to help to prepare you for the deluge of commentary. But it is not shaping up to be a historic contest.
Indeed, it may be encapsulated by a poignant exchange between a husband and wife (David and Karen) in Luton’s main shopping mall, reported by Sam Knight. “I ask David if he plans to vote Conservative. ‘It’s got to be better than the Labour lot, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘That’s just the way I see it. Maybe it isn’t…’ He is suddenly filled with doubt, and turns to his wife. ‘Karen, if you was voting, who would you vote for? You think they’re probably all the same don’t you.’ Karen looks down the mall. It is full of families. She speaks quietly. ‘I’d give the other ones a bit of a chance,’ she says.”
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David Goodhart
Labour is seeking a population plan for the next election—not about birth control, but immigration. Insiders tell me that the government, aware of the popular Tory plan for an annual immigration cap, is preparing to retreat from its laissez-faire approach to the size of Britain’s population.
Labour has been jolted by the success of lobby group Migrationwatch, which has popularised the idea that Britain’s population is heading to 70m (from 61m today) in the next 20 years. Government insiders now concede that overall numbers do matter. You will hear more on this from ministers in the run-up to the election.
The government is probably right to reject an annual cap, because two important parts of the inward flow—asylum seekers and arrivals from other EU states—are not subject to its control. But it knows it has a very mixed record to defend on immigration and has alienated much of its core support by presiding, almost by accident, over the single biggest wave of immigration in British history. So expect Labour to accept that overall immigration numbers should fall, and that there should even be some overall population target.
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David Goodhart
Here at Prospect we eschew the wearisome political cynicism of our age and look forward to the election with a whistle and a skip. Like all national elections it is a festival of democracy—a chance for the country to talk to itself about how to cut the deficit (and whether a hung parliament would make it harder). We have sneaked in with an early “election special” to help to prepare you for the deluge of commentary. But it is not shaping up to be a historic contest. Indeed, it may be encapsulated by a poignant exchange between a husband and wife (David and Karen) in Luton’s main shopping mall, reported by Sam Knight. “I ask David if he plans to vote Conservative. ‘It’s got to be better than the Labour lot, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘That’s just the way I see it. Maybe it isn’t…’ He is suddenly filled with doubt, and turns to his wife. ‘Karen, if you was voting, who would you vote for? You think they’re probably all the same don’t you.’ Karen looks down the mall. It is full of families. She speaks quietly. ‘I’d give the other ones a bit of a chance,’ she says.”
Britain may not be feeling happy and confident but it is not broken either; the Tory slogan “It can’t go on like this” seems rather silly, when it so obviously will go on roughly like this whoever is in No 10. Moreover, it has been an oddly calm recession with no hint of the summer of rage we were promised—despite the fact that the slowdown follows Britain’s biggest ever immigration wave.
Many of the pieces in this issue—including David Willetts explaining how the Tories can foster co-operation without the state, and our special section on brain science—explore how insights from neuroscience and evolutionary psychology can inform politics. The drift of the debate seems to be favouring moderate Conservative positions, so perhaps it is the political zeitgeist leading science rather than the other way round. On most big questions of the day, however, it is shocking to realise how little most of us actually know about anything. Or rather, despite all that data on the web, we know almost nothing at first hand, relying instead on our chosen interpreters to help position ourselves along a spectrum of views and values. This was brought home to me by Roddy Campbell’s piece on why climategate matters. I had believed that the temperature record was a simple thing that gave us an even simpler message about the dangers of global warming. Now I’m not sure. It is still likely that pumping all that C02 into the atmosphere will lead to warming, possibly catastrophic warming, but the record is not yet convincing and its scientific guardians must surely be neutral dullards, not activists. A proper scepticism towards the data is not only legitimate, but necessary, before we change the way we live.
David Goodhart
Since Labour’s 1997 election victory 1.6m people have been granted permanent right of residence in Britain, mainly from developing countries. And in 2008 24 per cent of all births in England and Wales were to foreign-born mothers, rising to nearly 50 per cent in London. Strikingly, however, at no point in the last 12 years does there seem to have been a strategic discussion in cabinet about the purpose of much higher levels of immigration.
In the course of making an Analysis programme for BBC Radio 4 on New Labour and mass immigration, I discovered that the final decision to open Britain’s labour market to—as it turned out—more than 1m eastern Europeans was taken by a small group of officials and special advisers before an EU council of ministers meeting in Brussels.
An accumulation of small decisions, all of them perfectly rational and sensible in their own right, has led to a mighty big—and pretty unpopular—outcome. So why did it happen? There were two big background factors: much cheaper mass transit and Britain as a “magnet” both economically and culturally. Our fast growing economy—at least for most of the last 12 years—plus a deregulated labour market meant jobs galore at all skill levels. Then there is the pull of the English language and the “London effect”—a city with communities from all around the world.
But the magnet effect needed some political decisions from government to open the door—and between 1997 and 2003 there were four significant ones. First, there was the abolition of the so-called primary purpose rule, which had the effect of significantly raising the immigration of foreign spouses.
Second, the introduction of the Human Rights Act made it harder to clamp down on the asylum wave which began to rise sharply in 1999 to over 70,000 a year. Third was a liberalisation of student visas and work permits, both of which more than doubled after 1997. Finally, and most significant of all for the fabric of British life, was a decision to open the British labour market to the new eastern European and Baltic EU states, seven years before any other big EU state. As is now well known more than 1m people came after 2004.
All of these, with the exception of the primary purpose rule, had persuasive non-immigration rationales too. Foreign students helped to pay for an expanded higher education system. More nurses and doctors from abroad were vital for the NHS when public spending began to rise in 1999. Business lobbied very effectively for liberalisation, Whitehall was mainly in favour, and there was a network of NGOs and legal campaigners who also pushed to keep the door as wide as possible.
There is one more significant factor in all this: the pro-immigration, pro-diversity, assumption not just of the Cool Britannia left-of-centre but of a large part of the metropolitan middle class, who were not only comfortable with an increasingly multi-racial Britain, but also benefited economically from the cheap labour that flowed in. Meanwhile much of the political and administrative class believed that large inward flows were simply a fact of modern life.
A distinctively New Labour combination of economic and cultural liberalism was the backdrop to Britain’s great opening of the late 1990s. But notwithstanding the careless manner in which historic decisions have been taken, it would be wrong to say that things were completely made up on the hoof. There have been six major acts of Parliament relating to asylum and immigration since 1997—and Tony Blair spent a huge amount of time on asylum when popular anxiety was at its peak. There have also been anguished national debates about immigration and integration in the light of the 2001 race riots in the north of England and, of course, the 7/7 bombings. But Labour policy has been an odd mix of restriction and frenetic intervention on asylum for example, combined with benign neglect on the broader national purpose of mass immigration.
Belatedly, in the past couple of years the government has put in place a more coherent system of immigration control. There is now a points based system which should restrict work-related immigration to those people the country really needs, and electronic biometric-based border controls will soon count people in and out.
Moreover, aware of the popularity of the Tory plan for an annual immigration cap, the government is preparing to retreat from its laissez-faire approach to overall population growth. Labour has been jolted by the success of anti-mass-immigration lobby groups like Migration Watch and is now prepared to accept that overall numbers do matter. Expect to hear more on this from Alan Johnson or Gordon Brown.
But when historians come to look back on this period in 100 years time they will surely conclude that, as John Seeley said of the expansion of the British empire, we acquired a whole new population in a “fit of absence of mind.”
Analysis: Foreigner Policy is on BBC Radio 4 on Monday 8th February at 8.30pm
Hear David Goodhart discuss national identity at Bath Literature Festival: “Can you still be proud to be British?” takes place on Saturday 27 Feb, 1pm – 2pm. Further details: www.bathlitfest.org.uk/prospectbritain
David Goodhart
Prospect's editor, David Goodhart
Twenty years on from 1989, few people still believe that goodwill and dollars alone can solve the world’s problems. But perhaps the last vestige of post-1989 utopianism has survived among the new media apostles who argue that authoritarian states can be brought low by the internet. Evgeny Morozov’s cover essay is a vivid rebuttal of that idea—best summed up by the American comedian Jon Stewart’s retort to those who think the web is freeing Iraqis, Iranians and Afghans: “What, we could have liberated them over the internet? Why did we send an army when we could do it the same way we buy shoes?”
David Cameron’s Tories are not so naive as to believe that Twitter will bring down tyrants, but they maintain an attractive optimism about new technologies and politics in general. Optimism is easier in opposition, but in early November Cameron’s Hugo Young lecture, on the theme “big society, rather than big state,” re-established a coherent liberal message after his rather dotty party conference speech, which almost advocated abolishing the state altogether. Listening to his lecture, it was possible to believe again that the Tories have put the Major, Hague, IDS and Howard years behind them and might combine the best of New Labour with a keener appreciation of the unintended consequences of state action. But there are reasons for scepticism too. First, it is easy to express concern about poverty and inequality to a Guardian audience.
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Prospect
US engineer Martin Cooper holds the world’s first handheld cellular phone, which he invented in 1973, alongside his current mobile phone at a conference in Oviedo, Spain. The original allowed 35 minutes of talk time and weighed 1kg
Europe
Who really brought down the Berlin wall?
There was an undignified moment in November’s celebrations of the fall of the Berlin wall, when two Nobel peace laureates seemed poised for a full-scale war over who had been most influential in 1989. Talking to German magazine Der Spiegel, Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa downplayed Moscow’s role in the thaw and called Gorbachev a “weak politician”—leading the former leader of the USSR to denounce Walesa for wanting “a bigger slice off the pie.” (President Sarkozy, meanwhile, was busy scraping egg off his face as his claim to have been in Berlin on the big day turned out to be less than entirely accurate.)
The debate could have thundered on but, fortunately for all involved, clarification was at hand in the form of Daniel Johnson, editor of the British monthly Standpoint and, in 1989, foreign correspondent for the Telegraph. In a lengthy November cover story for his magazine, Johnson reveals that it was, in fact, him who brought down the wall. At least, he says, the question that he asked—“what will happen to the Berlin wall now?”—at the press conference on 9th November earned him, in the words of one author, “a measure of credit for bringing down the wall.” Strangely enough, several other journalists (including the German Peter Brinkmann and the Italian Riccardo Ehrman) have claimed that their questions, asked after a statement on free movement from the East German central committee, were more vital. But Johnson—who compared his role as an observer to TS Eliot’s in 1942—sets the record straight, pinpointing the failure to answer his query as “the moment when the cold war ended.”
By a remarkable coincidence, Prospect’s own editor David Goodhart was also in East Berlin that night—although his rather more unworldly location was a conference on rock music promotion hosted by East Germany’s culture ministry. As he explains on Prospect’s blog, this meant that “I am the only British journalist who witnessed that great evening in the company of pony-tailed American pop music impresarios.” Not quite the hand of history—but a striking image nonetheless.
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David Goodhart
Twenty years on from 1989, few people still believe that goodwill and dollars alone can solve the world’s problems. But perhaps the last vestige of post-1989 utopianism has survived among the new media apostles who argue that authoritarian states can be brought low by the internet. Evgeny Morozov’s cover essay is a vivid rebuttal of that idea—best summed up by the American comedian Jon Stewart’s retort to those who think the web is freeing Iraqis, Iranians and Afghans: “What, we could have liberated them over the internet? Why did we send an army when we could do it the same way we buy shoes?”
David Cameron’s Tories are not so naive as to believe that Twitter will bring down tyrants, but they maintain an attractive optimism about new technologies and politics in general. Optimism is easier in opposition, but in early November Cameron’s Hugo Young lecture, on the theme “big society, rather than big state,” re-established a coherent liberal message after his rather dotty party conference speech, which almost advocated abolishing the state altogether. Listening to his lecture, it was possible to believe again that the Tories have put the Major, Hague, IDS and Howard years behind them and might combine the best of New Labour with a keener appreciation of the unintended consequences of state action. But there are reasons for scepticism too. First, it is easy to express concern about poverty and inequality to a Guardian audience. Yet the rise in inequality stems mostly from two Tory measures in the 1980s: tax reductions for the well off and financial deregulation. Cameron has no intention of reversing either, so how will he improve on Labour’s patchy record? Second, the Cameron liberals are a thin slice at the top of the party and could get swept aside. Third, the Tories have recently shown serious lapses of judgement. Appointing General Richard Dannatt as a defence adviser astonished some people who know his beliefs in non-military matters. And William Hague’s campaign against Tony Blair’s EU presidency bid—more effective than is generally realised—was an act of unpatriotic party political spite. If we are staying in Europe we must make it work for us. John Major sulked on the margins, but after 1997 Blair bent the EU to our national interest on defence, enlargement, liberalisation and so on. As president he would have helped to reconcile the British public to European realities. Cameron is more pragmatic on Europe, but Hague may call the shots in the event of a narrow Tory victory which will empower Eurosceptic MPs. Does that mean pro-EU liberals have to hope for a thumping Tory victory?
David Goodhart
1989: "Ich war dabei"
I was there in Berlin on November 9th 1989. There is nothing special about this: it seems that half the world was there with me, although I don’t recall seeing them at the time. Daniel Johnson, the editor of a rival publication, even claims to have asked the vital question at an East Berlin press conference that led to the announcement that the wall was effectively defunct. But I think I am the only British journalist who witnessed that great evening in the company of pony-tailed American pop music impresarios.
The East German regime had been looking vulnerable for several weeks—even since the big East German outflow through Hungary—and we (at the Financial Times where I was working) were taking every opportunity to get into the country to gauge popular feeling. So when the opportunity came to attend a conference on rock music promotion in East Germany at a swanky East Berlin hotel from November 9th to 10th I grabbed it.
The East German government was keenly aware of the importance of rock music in keeping its young people happy and it used to attract a stream of the best bands in the world. It also had quite a thriving rock music industry of its own and was keen to export bands—at least those who could be relied upon to return. As I sat rather bored listening to East German cultural bureaucrats debating with the pony-tailed Americans I remember someone coming into the hall, in the early evening, and saying that the wall had opened.
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David Goodhart
David Goodhart: "will rich-country citizens really make big sacrifices to stop Bangladesh from disappearing in 25 years’ time?"
To whom do we owe obligations? With whom do we feel solidarity? These are two of the oldest questions in politics, but they are posed in a stark new way by the fallout from climate change. Most people in rich countries feel a vague sense of obligation and even empathy towards those struggling to get by in poor countries, but they practise a much stronger sense of “fellow citizen favouritism” towards the people in their own nations. And it is good that they do. Without such favouritism there would be no point to the nation state. This does not, however, mean that national solidarity must conflict with global solidarity—if anything it seems to be a condition of it. In recent years the British government has sharply increased both domestic social spending and global aid, and the rich countries most generous with aid have high levels of national solidarity too.
Yet will rich-country citizens really make big sacrifices to stop Bangladesh from disappearing in 25 years’ time? Is it even plausible to expect rich countries to accept the principle that the right to emit carbon should be equally shared across the world’s population? After all, as Vijay Joshi points out in our Copenhagen special, no one argues that natural resources like oil should be equally shared, and it is not clear that rich-country citizens should be forced to pay for having done something (using up the safe, carbon-absorbing capacity of the atmosphere) unwittingly. Yet the Copenhagen summit will commit rich countries to very large transfers of resources to poor ones, in order to limit their emissions without choking off growth. Understandably, legitimacy for this idea has been sought on grounds of self-interest, not global solidarity: rich-country politicians argue (see Ed Miliband in the Copenhagen special) that we too will suffer the floods or have to fend off the migrating masses if the climate turns nasty.
The problem is not that our politicians are being sneaky about the degree of altruism we are being asked to show; and the vast sums of money look more manageable when spread over decades. The real trouble is that, except in wartime, western democracies are not good at appealing to citizens’ “better selves” to make sacrifices for their own futures—it is distance in time more than place that makes it so hard to respond to climate change. Authoritarian China has shown that it can do economic growth as well as the democracies (at least in the early stages). And if climate pessimists are right and big lifestyle changes are required, authoritarianism may prove good at that too (see China’s one child policy). The fact that China seems likely to bring more to Copenhagen than the US could be a straw in the wind.
Brian Semple
How The Light Gets In, the UK's first philosophy and music festival, kicks off this weekend in Hay-on-Wye
The last ten years have seen dramatic changes in what we expect from summer festivals. Not so long ago the choices were limited to tunnelling under the fence at Glastonbury, or champagne and warbling for a privileged few at Glyndebourne. But each year brings a plethora of new and innovative festivals, and now for the more cerebral festival-goer there is the Prospect sponsored How The Light Gets In, the UK’s first philosophy and music festival which starts this Friday at Hay and runs until 31st May.
The festival invites guest to “think/listen/dance/play”, and offers a programme ranging from philosophy seminars to arts and theatre workshops and musical performances. The line-up includes Susan Neiman, Will Hutton, Phillip Blond and Geoff Mulgan, as well as Prospect’s own David Goodhart, who will be discussing market regulation and individual freedoms. Other topics of discussion include religious fundamentalism, utopianism, revolution and the enlightenment.
After putting the world to rights, guests can relax in the evenings when the music starts, with everything from indie folk to Afro-Celt fusion and reggae. Click here for more details.
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