12 August 2021
The eminent jurist Elizabeth Doolittle once averred:
‘Words Words Words
I’m so sick of words
I get words all day through’.
Of course, the problem of too many words and not enough meaning is an old problem.
Once can point at a current example and deplore it, and soon someone in reply will point out it is nothing new.
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I make absolutely no apology for taking action to remove foreign criminals – keeping the public safe from the likes of murderers, rapists & child sexual abusers.
The Borders Bill will make it easier for the UK to remove them.#NewPlanForImmigration🇬🇧https://t.co/7UTgJJXHoc
— Priti Patel MP (@pritipatel) August 12, 2021
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Perhaps it is not new, and perhaps the only difference now is that, because of the internet, there are just far more words to be seen.
An ever-growing tower of babble.
But.
The use (misuse, abuse) of words by the authoritarian populist nationalists in today’s politics – in both the United Kingdom and the United States – does seem to have something novel to it.
Maybe it is the shamelessness of the knowing disconnect between words and their meanings – as if our ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ predicament meant that politicians do not even need to try to have words that correspond with reality.
If so, and if this is indeed a novel situation, then there is no inherent reason to believe that politics will be happily cyclical, and that we will return to the good days of there being a match between what politicians say and what they do.
That said, it may not actually be that happy and good, if those politicians – like Orban in Hungary (see here) – next say illiberal things and very much do mean them, because they no longer care about liberal pieties.
For the illiberal politicians of our age, it seems the first step is to rob words of meanings, and then to be unafraid of saying what they really do mean.
This in turn makes the political challenge difficult for those (of us) who are liberal and progressive.
Not only do we have to combat the assault upon truth, but we then have to combat the follow-on candid and unapologetic assault upon human dignity and autonomy.
It is a grim prospect – and it is one for which illiberals ‘make absolutely no apologies’.
Brace, brace.
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We are enduring a period where key Western democracies have been manipulated by those who lie to camera without fear of immediate punishment. The Putin playbook has resulted in an Orwellian dystopia that may defy the expected cyclical correction.
Let’s hope that there enough liberal-minded Tory voters who will be sufficiently repelled by this sort of sentiment to change their vote next time.
Such populist language vs migrants is not confined to the UK and US but quite normative from the right wing government of Australia, and in Europe from the Christo-nationalist governments in Poland and Hungary and Italy under Salvini who may be back in power soon.
The problem for human rights advocates in the UK is that Patel has cunningly picked some low hanging fruit as it’s massively popular that migrants convicted of violent crimes be deported. Progressives protesting this action will find that its the UK’s Willie Horton moment.
Why should criminals get deported after serving their sentences? Why shouldn’t the punishment be the same for everyone – so since citizens are not deported, non-citizens shouldn’t either?
The only exception I’d make would be for people who came to the country specifically to commit crimes that they wouldn’t have commited where they came from.
I wonder if there is a publishing house dedicated to the ‘totally insincere announcement’ playbook. A kind of School for Scandal with added lawyers. Sheridan would have admired the government announcement machine.
Insincerity extends more widely, take ‘Your call is important to us’ repeatedly and repeatedly. Obviously if my call will make money it will get answered – otherwise…
We have indeed returned to the early Georgian era. But going backwards rather than forwards.
This is intended to be a ‘wedge issue’, which divides the Labour Party from potential working class supporters.
The cynical presumption among Tory strategists is that defenders of human rights will struggle to win support from the apocryphal Man on the Clapham Omnibus on this issue.
Their preferred narrative is of uncaring limousine liberals who place liberal pieties above the real interests of potential working class voters. This policy is likely to be quite popular with some voters, we have to admit. Child arrivals deported for dope dealing or aggravated shoplifting won’t cut through.
And the policy will not critically appraised. Consider the media attention placed on such deportations. What does Priti have in mind for an encore?
Like the Three Strikes campaign in the US, the objective of the campaign is political advantage (and public spectacle) rather than improved outcomes from the criminal justice system.
Like transportation to Australia, it might even perversely incentivise more serious criminal behaviour (sheep and lambs spring to mind).
And yet – depressingly – one has to hope that Starmer will pragmatically decide to avoid the obvious trap.
And so it goes.