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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Barbara Demick
Kim Chaek Ironworks in the industrial city of Chongjin, the largest ironworks in North Korea
When I first met Song Hee-Suk, in 2004, she had been out of North Korea for two years. I was interviewing people from Chongjin—an industrial city in the far northeast of North Korea, near the Chinese border—for the Los Angeles Times. We arranged to meet at the paper’s office in Seoul. I opened the door to an immaculately dressed, tiny woman who exuded confidence. She wore a large jade ring and a pink polo shirt tucked into neatly pressed beige trousers. Everything from her cheery pastels to her perfectly coiffed hair suggested a woman in control of her life. At first glance, it was impossible to tell what kind of past she carried with her.
Mrs Song defected from North to South Korea in August 2002. In the first—and least hazardous—part of her escape she was driven the 50 miles from Chongjin to the border. There, clinging to the back of a guide, she forded the Tumen river and arrived in China. Some time after, using a forged passport and a false name, she took a flight from the city of Dalian in northeast China to Incheon in South Korea.
She knew only one other person on the plane—a young man sitting a few rows away, who had come to her hotel room at 6am to give her the passport. It had been stolen from a South Korean woman of about the same age, the original photos extracted with a razor blade. If questioned, Mrs Song would pretend to be a tourist who had spent a long weekend in Dalian, a popular seaside resort. To support her story, she was dressed in clothes that would have looked outlandish in North Korea—capri-style jeans and white sneakers. She carried a sporty backpack. Her handlers had pierced her ears (something women in North Korea didn’t do) and her hair had been done in a style favoured by South Korean women of a certain age. Mrs Song had spent two weeks being fattened up and groomed so that she wouldn’t look like a refugee. The one thing that might give her away was her guttural North Korean accent. She was advised not to make small talk.
Mrs Song sat perfectly still in the plane, her hands folded on her lap. She wasn’t particularly nervous. Her serenity came from the certainty that she was doing the right thing by defecting. Her eldest daughter, Oak-hee, had fled North Korea three years earlier, and she was going to join her. She wanted to see with her own eyes the world she had glimpsed on television.
The smugglers that Oak-hee had hired to bring her mother to South Korea were astounded that this sweet little grandmother could board an international flight carrying a doctored passport without breaking into a sweat. Had the Chinese immigration authorities detected her forged documents, she would have been arrested and sent back to North Korea to face prison camp. But her mind was made up.
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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
Has Europe lost the plot?
Christopher Caldwell is a brilliantly cold-eyed observer of the pieties of European multiculturalism. His essay in this month’s Prospect—an adapted extract from his new book—is a meditation on what happened when mass immigration collided with Europe’s postwar liberal universalism and its playing down of national tradition.
The answer is, of course, a great deal of confusion. “The range of opinions that Europeans can express has narrowed dramatically in recent years,” Caldwell writes. “Have Europeans acquired manners or lost their liberties?”
He is not just sneering at political correctness, although there is some of that too, he is trying to understand where it came from. And unlike so much commentary in this area Caldwell, an American, has a truly pan-European eye on these events.
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