Lisa Nandy’s media-round sounds like the sort of thing you might be signed up to if you failed to make the cut as a Newsround Press Packer. Unfortunately for us, it’s actually a key part of the government’s comms strategy as the Culture Secretary was sent out on to the airwaves this morning. Inevitably she was asked about the Piddington fiasco. The government is ‘listening’ to villagers in Piddington, purred Nandy, but is ‘not going to change our plans’. Nothing shows you’re ‘listening’ to people quite like doing the exact opposite of what they’re asking you to do.
This sort of passive-aggressive language is what we’ve come to expect from Labour ministers
Nandy said it wasn’t fair that asylum seekers have mainly been housed in poor areas until now, adding: ‘I would just gently say we are all going to have to do our bit’. This sort of passive-aggressive language is what we’ve come to expect from Labour ministers every time someone quite reasonably brings up the insanity of the status quo. There is nothing ‘just gently’ about forcing a village of 356 people to absorb 1,250 male migrants. Moreover, why does anyone ‘have to do their bit’ on widely unpopular illegal migration? Making it sound like ‘Clap for Carers’ doesn’t change the fact that this is a policy voters overwhelmingly hate. You know who could do their bit? The government, by removing the insane incentives of free accommodation and benefits for those who arrive. But of course, ‘everyone doing their bit’ is one of those irregular conjugations which only seems to exist in the third person. It is something for other people, not for MPs.
Last month, Andy Burnham addressed the people of Piddington in very similar terms: ‘All parts of the country need to play their part.’ Again the attempt to make it sound like a rousing patriotic endeavour, like Dunkirk or taking in wartime evacuees, is particularly invidious. This is our own Goodnight Mister Tom, but instead of a sweet little Cockney lad it’s fighting age males from troubled parts of the world who are disproportionately likely to commit sex crimes.
Of course, using the migrant crisis to stir inter-regional resentment is just one part of what is fast becoming a government tactic to divide and rule. The great irony is that much of Burnham’s early rhetoric majored on ‘ending divisions’. Yet now he and his ministers are engaged in the cynical business of pitching town against country, north against south, class against class. He might dress it up in faux Andy Capp chumminess, but the content is much more Grima Wormtongue.
Consider what his much trumpeted ‘Devolution’ actually means in practice: it increasingly seems to be a case of taxes going up in certain areas – raiding efficient London councils in order to redistribute money to those defined by financial profligacy, special tourism levies and so on. Ironically the Burnham government is determined to prevent devolved institutions from doing things they don’t like, and the direction of travel only ever goes one way.
After the government announced plans to let mayors retain a share of business rates and income tax, Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen proposed a rebate scheme to let families keep more of what they earn and was immediately rebuffed by Louise Haigh. The Government’s approach seems to be: devolution, but not if it results in anything we disapprove of.
However, pitting regions of the country against each other is already biting him on the backside. Enter what some are calling ‘The Celtic Avengers’, which makes them sound like a racist folk group, or those Cornish separatists who tried to set Rick Stein’s fish restaurant on fire. Ridiculous though John Swinney, Mary Lou McDonald and Rhun ap Iorwerth might be, they see an easy target in Burnham and are already turning his own schtick against him.
Following the Prime Minister’s careless words on Scotland at PMQs, when he foolishly gave nationalists ammunition for a second independence referendum, by suggesting another poll could be held if there were “clear consensus”, Swinney immediately and predictably demanded a meeting to determine the precise mechanism for enacting this. For all Burnham’s attempt to sow divisions between regions in England, it turns out there are politicians in the rest of Britain who are much better at this sort of grievance-mongering than he is. With Reform biting at his heels in England, Burnham can ill-afford to suffer collapse in Scotland and Wales; but if Labour is just seen as merely the SNP-lite then that could happen. Faced with such carelessness, unionists may reasonably decide to take their vote elsewhere.
Ironically, the best response to the division which Nandy, Burnham et al are subtly trying to peddle is a very old-fashioned left-wing concept: solidarity. Genuine solidarity is needed, but not on purely regional grounds. If you’re a taxpayer being fleeced, if you believe in national borders, if you think the breakup of the union is a bad thing, then resist the siren call of Andy and Nandy’s stirring-up of grudges and instead focus on getting rid of them as quickly and efficiently as possible.
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