The great civic crisis of our times is state capacity. When policies favoured by voters are repeatedly met with a bureaucratic 403 error – the action you requested is forbidden by our servers – dissatisfaction with the established order grows, as does the appeal of those outside the mainstream who wish to topple that order.
If a country refuses to take back citizens who have committed serious crimes in Britain, that country is hostile to our interests and a legitimate target for sanctions
Among those policies which the public has been told simply aren’t possible are the Rwanda scheme; withdrawal from the ECHR; the deportation of Islamist hate preachers; the restriction of social housing/welfare/non-emergency NHS services to citizens; the securing of Britain’s maritime border against people-smuggling; and most infamously Brexit, which the state was so unwilling to deliver that it took two general elections, the collapse of the two-party system and unleashing Dominic Cummings on the civil service to get it done – and even then on the most limited and compromised terms.
The political mainstream is flashing a 403 error once again, this time over Reform’s plans to deport all foreigners currently residing at His Majesty’s Pleasure, a move proposed as an alternative to the impending liberation of about 5,000 lags to ease overcrowding. There are presently 10,000 overseas nationals, roughly 12 per cent of the prison population, and the most commonly represented nationalities are Albanians, Poles, Romanians, Irish and Lithuanians. Nigel Farage wants to return them to sender and, if their home countries refuse, to ship them off to El Salvador where criminals are kept in supermax prisons under a harsh regime brought in by authoritarian president Nayib Bukele, the only Covid lockdown enthusiast the right idolises and the only Palestinian the left doesn’t idolise.
A reasonable liberal response to these plans might question the wisdom of repatriating so many offenders, including the most serious, when Britain’s borders are pitifully porous, meaning some of them could soon be back on the streets. Or we might ask, as Politico’s London Playbook did, about the third of foreign inmates who are on remand, and so who haven’t been convicted yet. (Reform says they won’t be included in the scheme.)
Another concern would be the legal and ethical implications of transferring people currently in British custody to a regime where the US State Department notes ‘credible reports’ of ‘harsh and life-threatening prison conditions’. Donning my Professional Jock bunnet, I would ask what will become of foreign nationals imprisoned in Scotland, where justice and prisons are devolved competencies.
But there is a difference, an important one, between interrogating the practicalities of Reform’s proposals (or objecting to them in principle) and dismissing the very idea that Britain can remove thousands of foreigners from its prisons. The former is scepticism, the latter resignation.
Labour says: ‘Reform have no serious answers to the Tory prisons crisis and would lead the system to collapse.’ Removing thousands of non-citizens would cause our prison system to collapse? You’re going to have to show your working on that one, Labour spokesperson. Ben Wallace, former defence secretary and conscience of the Tory left, tweets: ‘Reform have to answer a.) how they will force those countries to take these offenders. For decades they have refused to. b) if they won’t and then deport them but they are released how will that sit with their victims? And the Irish offenders will find it easy to return.’
The point about victim impact is a fair one. But, and I say this as someone who reckons Wallace was a good’un at the MoD, ‘we have to keep foreign baddies because their native lands won’t allow us to deport them’ is hazardously close to an admission that the UK is not sovereign within its own borders. If a country refuses to take back citizens who have committed serious crimes in Britain, that country is hostile to our interests and a legitimate target for sanctions. These might include taxing remittances; withdrawing development aid; curtailing migration by their nationals; vetoing their resolutions at the UN; blocking their officials from government-sponsored programmes and cooperation initiatives; and even freezing diplomatic relations.
Many within the governing class – politicians, civil servants, lobbyists, journalists and academics – will recoil in horror at the previous sentence. They’re all for soft power, of course, but using it? Against other countries? To advance Britain’s interests? The very notion is scandalous. And this is before we ask them to consider that, maybe just maybe, handing over so much power to courts, quangos, devolved administrations, mayors, commissioners and international bodies, has hollowed out the central state and left MPs and officials impotent, complacent, and even decadent, the apotheosis of Robert Frost’s ‘man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel’.
If the political mainstream doesn’t grasp the perils of speaking as though the British are international doormats, they will receive a crash course at the ballot box. Not merely in support for Reform which, despite its populist poses remains within the liberal-democratic tradition, but in increased support for Restore. The Restore leader Rupert Lowe is a Powellite Tory at heart but his banner attracts ideologues with aims and ideals alien to Britain’s democratic traditions.
To defeat the populist right, liberals will have to stop throwing up their hands in despair and come up with answers to Britain’s problems that satisfy the public’s legitimate expectations while remaining true to liberal principles. For the avoidance of doubt, said principles require that we deal fairly and humanely with those within our jurisdiction; they do not require that we act as a doss house for Albanian robbers. If the liberal state persists in telling the public it cannot perform its basic duties, it should not be surprised if the public begins to look for another kind of state.
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