by liberal japonicus
Alfred the Great was surprised by ‘the Great Heathen Army’ (a great name for a punk band) led by Viking King Guthrum and escaped disguised as a peasant. While in disguise, he was able to hide in a cowherd’s hut and the cowherd’s wife asked him to watch some oatcakes on a griddle. Alfred, thinking about his situation, let the cakes burn and got roundly scolded by the women.
Well, the Danes have slipped in again, this time invading the headspace of Labour, specifically Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, with their ideas about immigration, and while Mahmood and Labour are preoccupied with Farage and Reform, they are burning the oatcakes. Not the best analogy, but if it holds, we’ll see part of the country under some new Danelaw where non-English (whatever the f that means) spend 2 decades before a select few who’ve mastered Estuary English and are sufficiently deracinated are granted the boon of citizenship. (Ironically, Farage’s constituency is in Clacton, which is in Essex, which was under Danelaw)
At the risk of UKsplaining to all of you (and corrections are gratefully accepted), the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, proposed a set of reforms to UK immigration which include renewing a leave to remain visa every 2.5 years and requiring 20 years before asylum seekers can apply for a visa to stay. There was also some reports about confiscating jewelry and other assets, including non-sentimental jewelry. I guess it is too bad that people don’t have gold fillings anymore…
If you haven’t discerned the outlines of my take on this, it basically mirrors Green Party head Zack Polanski’s take:
The Green leader accused Labour of announcing policies that their supporters didn’t vote for, and labelled the plans ‘extreme and inhumane.’
He continued: “This is a government of cowards. The issue here is not immigration, it’s inequality.
“They went for the pensioners, they went for the disabled, and now they’re going for people fleeing war and conflict.”
Polanski said he and many others were “furious” with the government because the plans are a “totally unconscionable way to deal with things.”
I do admit that this is a bit of a rhetorical high horse. After all, I’m an American and given the way things are going down in the US, I might think about the stones I’m casting. In addition, I’m living in Japan, which has even less to offer in the way of alternatives. On some of the stuff I’ve read and listened to, the argument is made that somehow, Labour has to undercut Reform and this is a way to do it. And I’ve seen several things where it is felt that an acknowledgement has to be made of stopping the boats and defending the borders and this is somehow unavoidable, all accompanied with an appropriate amount of chin-pulling. Aware of my own position, I still want to call bullshit.
The strange thing is, the refugees in asylum hotels are prohibited from working, which has them doing nothing and leading to friction where the hotels are. I’m not sure why they couldn’t create a WPA-like scheme to start to employ them, though I imagine the private sector would get their mitts on it and skim the wages. Or use it to undercut striking agency staff who are doing scab bin collection in place of the striking bin collectors in Birmingham. This would probably result in the asylum seekers getting exposed to unionization efforts and before you know it, communism.
Of course, irony of ironies, the Danish centre-left party that has been responsible for pushing these immigration ideas just had a shitty election result.
Of course, it’s being an American living in Japan makes this sort of opinion (harkening back to the Stewart Lee post) a bit of champagne socialism. But I’d argue that if Tommy Robinson is giving you props, you probably want to do a bit of a rethink and wonder why you burnt those cakes.
In terms of internal climate migration, I think it is important to realize that the US does not have one form of nationalism. My guess is that we have at least three competing forms of nationalism, and the White Christian Nationalist side of things is going to find itself on the move moreso than the others. For reference, we have the maps here at the Public Religion Research Institute: https://prri.org/research/support-for-christian-nationalism-in-all-50-states/
Note that support for Christian Nationalism is strongest in the Southeast, Northern Plains, and the Great Plains states that connect those regions.
Compare this with the map of climate winners and losers at Pro Publica: https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/
My guess is that we will see some migration along the diagonal between these areas as people leave the Southeast and look for something like the “American Redoubt” for their idea of a nationalist utopia, and we are going to start seeing some stark regional divides between WA/ID and MN/SD. Think Ruby Ridge. There’s more of that on tap, but the right is now much more aligned with their fringe, so that’s going to be more difficult to deal with.
It’s one of the things that would make me think harder about settling in places like Spokane, Eugene, or Fargo. Those could become the epicenters for violence fueled by dueling nationalisms in the region.
So what happens to nationalism if many more people are either moving from place to place or or at least relocating from where they were raised? Does it become stronger among the relatively few who stay put? How do they handle being outnumbered by “the others”? Do the movers become citizens of the world?
Well, you might have the Dubai model with a small number of citizens (roughly 5% in the case of Dubai) and the rest viewing it transactionally. One could scoff at that, because the numbers are so extreme in the case of Dubai, but the whole discourse of “diversity is what makes us strong” is being discarded like yesterday’s trash. While moving from one state to another doesn’t trigger dystopian images, you start to get a larger and larger group of people who move further afield.