Some Further Thoughts on Jeremy Corbyn and the Borders Crisis

I thought I���d post a few further thoughts on the great Corbasm, and the events in Germany over the weekend.

 

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the obvious rage and discontent among political journalists (who have spent the last five years and lots of money taking Blairites to lunch, all now wasted) who are appalled at the cheek of the Labour Party in picking a candidate they don���t know and don���t like. This isn���t much to do with politics. In my experience few political journalists have any interest in politics or any interesting views on the subject. They���re all ���modernisers��� or ���centrists���, meaningless expressions which (being interpreted) mean that they unthinkingly accept whatever conventional wisdom is until it changes, whereupon they accept the new conventional wisdom. 

First Corbyn wouldn���t win. Then he did. Then there would be a putsch against him. Then his majority made that rather difficult. Then he wouldn���t be able to form a Shadow Cabinet. Then he did.  Then there weren���t enough women in the new Shadow Cabinet (fat lot I care, not believing that someone���s sex is, by itself, either a qualification or a disqualification for political office). Then there were more women in it than men. Then none of them was Shadow Chancellor. Well, there aren���t that many women in great offices of state (so-called) in the real Cabinet, and I don���t recall Mr Cameron being quizzed very hard on this, or anything else much.

The reporters have seldom been so out of the loop. Perhaps that���s why, on the BBC at lunchtime, Mr Corbyn was interviewed with the camera practically shoved up his right nostril,  an angle that could reasonably be described as unflattering. Gosh, how one wishes that all this suspicion and hostility had been unleashed on the Blair creature when *he* was first elected, amid much adulation and almost no questioning, back in 1994. 

 

I still think those who dismiss Corbynism as a purely leftist upsurge need to explain the very large public meetings which took place wherever he spoke. My own solitary experience of one of these did not suggest that those attending were solely battle-hardened old Bennites yearning for their lost youth. Many were simply curious, and indeed enthused by a feeling that they were being asked their opinion, and doing something that they had been told not to do. 

 

What is so great about the other politicians, exactly? Can someone tell me? What are they good at? What do they stand for? What do they know?  What are their great qualifications? I agree that Mr Corbyn is undistinguished, academically or in life. But that would be a more powerful argument if he weren't up against the veterans of various Bullingdon club offensives in the restaurants of Oxfordshire, heading a Cabinet of forgettable nonentities whose names and deeds few can recall.  It's not as if the Cameron Cabinet is full of decorated warriors, brilliant businessmen, academic giants or anything else much. 

 

There is a malaise abroad in this country and it is not confined to left-wingers. Anyone with any memory knows that this is a worrying and uncertain time, full of signs and portents.  The glass is falling, hour by hour, if you care to look.

 

Where will the young find proper jobs? How will they pay the enormous debts they are contracting? How will the British government pay the enormous debts it is contracting? Historically, the only way out of indebtedness on this scale has been the debauched horror of hyper-inflation, which destroys the middle class, and so destroys stability and responsibility.

 

How will they find places to live that they can afford? Where and how will they educate their children? Are these claims of brilliance in non-selective academies true? If they are, why don���t Michael Gove, who created and talked up so many of them, and the Prime Minister, who is always saying how wonderful they are, send their own children to them?

 

 

For the middle-aged, there is a different set of worries.  In many former industrial areas, jobs have vanished,  shops are boarded up and houses unlet and unsaleable. How long can society endure in such surroundings? Can nobody stop my neighbourhood being devoured by cars and traffic?  Or, in the countryside, is there now to be no limit on the expansion of what were once compact, pleasant villages into ugly sprawl, composed of cardboard hutches too small for civilised life, whose occupants can hear their neighbours breathing? Who will replace the doctors who have served me all my adult life and who are now retiring in increasing numbers, or going abroad for better conditions?(this is an even greater problem in country practices, where in many cases they will simply come to an end when the current generation retire).

 

Why must we submit to the growing retreat of supposed services ��� so that we cannot contact our town halls, our banks, the police,  our utility companies or anyone else, especially when problems arise and when we need them most? I think it also fair to say the welfare system has a habit of making life hardest for those who need it most, while turning a blind eye to many who are abusing it.

 

Must we endure the replacement of so many unskilled workers, especially in shops,  by robots? Whom does this benefit?

 

There may not be much official  inflation, but there is a form of inflation targeted on the thrifty - the prices of valuable assets, especially housing, are soaring out of reach, while savings accumulated over decades are quietly but relentlessly shrinking because of near-zero interest rates. And none of us can guarantee that the only assets most of us own - our houses ��� will not have to be sold for ���care��� at our lives��� ends.  It is not much comfort that few of us could now afford to buy the houses we own, when much of this fairy gold will be snatched away before we can hand it on.

 

And for all, of course, there is the great uncertainty of mass immigration, which I discuss below. Much has already taken place. How much more will there be? How will it affect our lives? 

 

***

Look at the amazing reversal in Germany. Just days after declaring that migrants were welcome, Germany has slammed shut its borders and halted trains from Austria and Hungary.

Germany, whose hoity-toity adoption of the Schengen no-borders agreement was always very pointed, now wishes to suspend that very agreement, having found that open borders work in several different ways. The last time I flew to a certain German airport from London, I noticed the ill-tempered way in which, as non-Schengen passengers, we were treated.   The immigration desk was set up so close to the bridge which led off the plane that the passport queue stretched back into the aircraft itself. The German passport officials scowled at us with a sort of Iron Curtain ferocity.  I had the strong impression, though of course I cannot prove it, that we were being punished for our irritating nonconformism. The distant facility-free corrals in other continental airports, used for non-Schengen passengers waiting to depart, do tend to give the same impression.

 

Germany wanted a free flow of cheap labour into its territory, and a free flow of goods outwards. I���ve for years been astonished at how little attention has been paid to Schengen and its political implications. Perhaps that���s because I travel quite a lot on the continent, in my xenophobic, Europhobic way, and still can���t get over the way things have changed since the borders were enforced.   How can the countries involved still claim to *be* countries when they���ve renounced any real power to decide who enters and leaves their territory (this question should also be asked of the UK which has gone most of the way to borderlessness by accepting the EU passport and abolishing its own). Yet the external border of the EU is still vigorously enforced. And they say it isn���t an empire. Like, hello? Amusingly, it is Germany which on this occasion has closed *its* frontiers against its subject nations, which makes it easier for them to do the same.  

 

But the multitudes who arrived over the weekend at Munich railway station (many of them, judging by films I���ve seen, not from Syria or anywhere near it)  have put a stop to that. Has Germany���s regularly over-rated Chancellor, Angela Merkel, now grasped the simple point that an unquestioning open door to economic migrants will increase the numbers of such migrants? News of this kind travels very fast in the modern world. I gather there is a growing market for real and faked Syrian passports.

 

While reasonable weather lasts, all who can will try to cross from Turkey to Greece, and from Libya to Italy, to get to Germany and Sweden. Some will fail, horribly.  Many will succeed.

 

But that���s only a small part of the reality.  This will not end when the weather turns bad at the equinox. It will return next year and the year after, and for decades to come. Migrants become citizens. And most of the migrants now arriving here come from societies where the clan is strong, where every man has an obligation to his many cousins. Once they are citizens, they will become a potent and irresistible lobby for ���family reunification���,  an unending process by which they will bring family members into EU territory, much as Hispanic migrants have done in the USA, transforming the culture of that country in 25 years, and continuing to do so even now. It is a fact, whether you approve of it or not, that we are talking about transformation, not a minor adjustment.

 

I stress that this is, on the migrants��� part, a perfectly reasonable response to EU governments which have resolved to welcome them.  I don���t blame them, or criticise them. As I have said before, I admire their enterprise and courage. Moving to another country, even in good circumstances, is a hard thing to do.

 

I criticise the many European governments which have acted to encourage migrants to act (perfectly rationally) in this way. This is what they decided to support, when they resolved on the policy of welcome. That is what the campaigners support, who urge a policy of welcome.