Members of the new Government have told us several times over the last few months that we have entered an “age of insecurity”. Keir Starmer used the phrase in June, as he was declaring his willingness to kill millions in nuclear strikes under unspecified circumstances, and his commitment to a huge increase in British military spending, to 2.5% of GDP. Rachel Reeves has used the phrase several times by way of diagnosing an illness for which her “securonomics” is the cure. The illness consists in political instability resulting in a lack of long-term investment; the cure consists in the creation of a new National Wealth Fund, which will invest £7.3 billion of public money into private businesses over the next five years, and in a refusal to substantially raise taxes or public spending, carrying on in all but name the policy of austerity which has caused so much needless suffering. And on the same theme, Labour’s manifesto proclaims an “age of insecurity” which necessitates “a return to the foundations of good government: national security, secure borders, and economic stability”, and an “enduring partnership” of the state with private business. As I write this the new Government seems intent on following these promises through – Keir Starmer is telling the leaders of NATO about the urgency of increasing military spending, while his ministers insist there is no prospect of increasing public spending even to the minimal degree of ending the eugenicist two-child benefit cap.
Of course, many people in the UK are living in insecurity, and have been for many years: a third of households with people of working-age have less than £1000 in savings; several thousand people sleep rough each night; around a million undocumented immigrants live and work in this country with no employment protections, no ability to legally rent, and no access to public funds. And, of course, we all live with global insecurity, with a dozen or so competing nuclear-armed states expressing their willingness to slaughter each other’s populations given sufficient provocation; with ongoing wars fuelled by the arms industry which Labour continues to champion; with climate change which Labour promises to do far too little to address; with around 120 million displaced people in the world whom Labour is committed to keeping out of our wealthy nation. Obviously, this is not the sort of insecurity which Starmer and Reeves are talking about. Labour has proposed – and the country has largely accepted – security for those who matter from the point of view of the British state. Labour’s “national security” will be achieved by subsidising a war of attrition in Ukraine, fought by conscripts and reducing still greater sections of the country to rubble, to end in a settlement almost certain to be no better for Ukrainians than that which could have been negotiated before the war began; and by a strengthened policy of nuclear deterrence which makes manifest a belief in the ultimate non-existence of the value of human life. Labour’s “economic stability” will involve propping up with public funds the conditions in which private capital can continue to flourish, even at the expense of those in genuine economic insecurity.
Labour have said very little about what the commitment to “border security” will involve in practice, but what they have said is deserving of scrutiny. In their manifesto they praise the Homes for Ukraine scheme, the Hong Kong humanitarian visas, and the tiny, strictly limited, and now defunct Syrian resettlement program, while committing to the prevention of arrivals by small boat. Presumably in Labour’s ideal world they would allow in only carefully selected, relatively affluent refugees and only those conveniently fleeing from a geopolitical rival, while preventing anyone else from reaching Britain by some means yet to be determined. We know that, in the real world, no such thing will happen. The people most desperately in need of refuge will rarely be those to whom it is most convenient to give it, and apart from that economic desperation is already enough of a driver by itself to make men, women and children make lethally dangerous crossings of the Sahara and the Mediterranean to get here. Yvette Cooper’s vaunted Border Security Command will not be able to fulfil its much-repeated mandate to “Smash the Gangs”, because it will do nothing that British and French security forces are not already doing with little success. But the focus on traffickers as drivers of irregular migration is intended to obfuscate the reality that people come to Britain in small boats because of political, economic and climactic problems in their home countries to which Labour has no solution. The question is not whether or not we want people to come here, because they are going to keep coming regardless. The question is whether we treat them as human beings once they’re here.
There is no compelling reason to be optimistic about the new Government’s answer. They have refused to commit to the opening of any safe, legal routes to asylum, despite this being the only means of claiming asylum they would theoretically be willing to accept. Nothing has been said about restoring to asylum seekers the right to work which the last Labour government took from them; nothing has been said about reporting conditions. The Rwanda plan has been abandoned, not on grounds of its inhumanity but because it would not deport people quickly or efficiently enough. Nothing has been said suggestive of anything except a continuation of the hostile environment. The obsessive focus on “smashing” traffickers is particularly concerning given that, in the face of the extreme difficulty of actually catching traffickers, the last Government tended to scapegoat refugees themselves, charging anyone who happened to have their hand on the tiller at any point in crossing with “facilitating illegal arrival”, providing minimal legal representation, and imposing custodial sentences long enough to preclude their ever being granted asylum. The plan to invest the new force with “counter-terrorism style powers” is hardly suggestive of any greater commitment to due process or to justice.
Dorothy Day asked long ago: “what right has any one of us to have security when God’s poor are suffering?” If you have any money, if you are white, if you are a British citizen, the new Government intends to give you a false sense of security at the expense of the poor, of migrants, and of anyone else it can get away with robbing. We have to reject such security as the Government is offering us. Those of us who are Christians know where we are obliged to place our loyalties – in those who are hungry, thirsty, unclothed, unhoused, or strangers in a strange land. If we can take him at his word, to follow Jesus is to give up your cloak, your house, your food, your time, all your possessions, and your social standing. He certainly expects us to give up our nuclear deterrent and our border. In an age of insecurity, we try to follow him as best as we are able.