Tim Stanley files Fourteen Words

The 'Thought For The Day' regular's latest homily in praise of Suella Braverman boils down to some very nasty conclusions.

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Suella Braverman has been “on manoeuvres” as increasingly creaky parlance of political hacks has it. With Rishi Sunak still looking likely to slip off to California within moments of losing the next election, she’s positioning herself as the candidate of choice for the (far) right of the Conservative Party.

That is why she flew to speak to a right-wing think-tank in Washington last week, decrying multiculturalism and reheating Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech.

Of course, editors and columnists at The Daily Telegraph, a far-right fanzine and comfort blanket for the tweediest corners of the Home Counties, are enormous fans of Braverman and have raved about her speech. Today, I want to look at just one of those columns; an effort published today and bylined to Tim Stanley:

The West must choose: borders, or destruction

Suella Braverman has said what everyone else was thinking: illegal migration is an existential threat

“What everyone else is thinking…” is a classic example of the false universality that papers and their columnists often rely on. Others include “everyone is talking about…”, references to “watercooler conversations”, and copy that barks at you about what you “must watch/read/eat”.

Stanley’s piece slips from irritating to sinister before the first sentence is done. What is it that everyone thinks in his opinion? That immigration — illegal immigration (play sound fx CD, track 6: ‘thunderclap’ now) — will destroy ‘us’. White supremacists love to chant a mantra, coined by the neo-Nazi terrorist David Eden Lane, known as the Fourteen Words (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”) The Telegraph subs and Stanley — who isn’t paid by the word —manage to express the same sentiment in six words.

As is common with columns from the current incarnation of the Telegraph, we diverge from reality immediately:

We have all been told that Suella Braverman is an evil racist, yet the “deplorable” speech she gave on immigration last week echoed the sentiments of at least one lovely liberal: Jack Straw. 

“Lovely liberal” Jack Straw who, with the encouragement of Tony Blair, instituted the first deportation targets (30,000 per year), set up raid squads, and expanded the detention system with privately-run, PFI-funded centres while Home Secretary.

“Lovely liberal” Jack Straw who vastly expanded police powers and state surveillance by pushing through the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000). “Lovely liberal” Jack Straw who stymied inquiries into Hillsborough and let Augusto Pinochet return to Chile (“I would trust Jack Straw’s judgement. He is a very fair man,” simpered Pinochet pal and top fangirl Margaret Thatcher).

“Lovely liberal” Jack Straw who signed off on British funding for ‘extraordinary rendition” operations as Foreign Secretary then later told the Foreign Affairs Select Committee that claims the UK was involved in rendition were “a conspiracy theory”.

In that context, it’s not quite the shocking slam dunk Stanley thinks it is when he recalls the then-Home Secretary’s 2001 speech on immigration:

[He] argued for reforming the Geneva convention on refugees so as to tackle people smuggling. “The convention was designed for an era when international flows of people were on a much smaller scale than they are today,” he explained, whereas mobile technology and cheaper travel now mean “long-distance migration is a realistic option – and a widespread aspiration… Thousands of would-be migrants are taking advantage of one aspect of the convention – namely, that it places an obligation on states to consider any application for asylum made on their territory, however ill-founded.”

The Daily Telegraph of 2001 responded to that speech with a leader column:

Let’s have an international debate, said Jack Straw… Let’s send them packing back to France, was the rather firmer line from Downing Street. Both, though, are wishful thinking, designed for electoral effect rather than practical implementation…

… the Government must find the courage to deal with the problem at the ports. Asylum seekers must be stopped as they arrive, dealt with quickly and efficiently under an expedited system, and a way found of returning those who fail to their countries of origin. We have been debating all this for years. What we need now is action, and fast. 

That was 22 years ago and the right-wing papers are playing the same songs and hyping up the same old confected crisis. Stanley is a tribute act for nasty old duffers who were writing the paper while he was still at university, a bow-tied future Labour parliamentary candidate who limited his irritating act to Cambridge University students unfortunate enough to be in his vicinity.

The right-wing rhetorical equivalent of an Elvis impersonator croons today that:

You might say the Tories have been historically more pro-immigration than Labour. Yes, Labour welcomed arrivals early from Eastern Europe: Straw later expressed regret for that decision. But at its peak, net migration ran at 268,000 under New Labour, within the EU, whereas last year it hit 606,000, despite Brexit. The Government will probably never rewrite the Human Rights Act because a minority of Tory MPs would block it – and if the Tories are the KKK in tweed, how do we explain the ethnic mix of the Cabinet?

You might say, “The Tories have been historically more pro-immigration than Labour” if you’ve never heard of Enoch Powell; Winston Churchill campaigning with the slogan “Keep England White”; Thatcher talking about Britain being “swamped by people with a different culture” — a speech that malfunctioning Krankies action figure Fraser Nelson claims was necessary to outflank the National Front (and attract their voters); the Federation of Conservative Students with its ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ posters; or Anthony Browne — now a Tory MP — who, as a Times and Spectator journalist — wrote a book saying British Muslims have divided loyalties (Do We Need Mass Immigration?) and articles accusing immigrants of hepatitis and AIDs.

The most notorious example in modern Tory history — the Smethick campaign during the 1964 general election — involved posters that read, ‘If you want a n––––r for a neighbour, vote Labour’ was actually sparked by the neo-Nazi British Movement, whose leader Colin Jordan claimed responsibility for the slogan. But the Conservative candidate — a South African apartheid supporter called Peter Griffiths — who won the seat told The Times during the campaign:

I should think [the posters are] a manifestation of popular feeling. 
I would not condemn anyone who said that… [It represents] exasperation, not fascism.

The same year, white residents of Smethick petitioned the Conservative-led council to compulsorily buy vacant houses to prevent Black people from buying them. The Labour housing minister, Richard Crossman, prevented the scheme by denying the council the borrowing facility to fund the policy.

When Stanley wrote in 2013 about the Smethick campaign, following Griffiths’ death, he wrote that it had a two-fold legacy:

First, it poisoned race relations in the UK and encouraged prejudice: the refusal of establishment figures like Griffiths to repudiate racism legitimised it and gave it a voice at the ballot box. 

Second, it poisoned the debate over immigration. As Britain evolved from an imperial power to a small nation-state, it had to adapt its policies and laws to reflect its changing wealth and priorities… The UK needed — still needs — to have a mature conversation about controlling its borders. But the ugly ditties of Smethwick or the stridency of Powellism made that impossible. Much of the Right argued on the basis not of reason but skin colour… 

But Tim Stanley (2013 variant) was — like so many of his Telegraph colleagues — not yet fully committed to acting as though nuance is an obscure village somewhere in France of which he knows little and has no desire to discover more.

One of post-Brexit Britain’s remaining booming export markets is strawmen and Tim Stanley (2023 variant) is committed to keeping the production line running. He writes:

Why, then, do some lobbyists characterise the rhetoric of her party as almost uniquely political and wicked? Because these critics have a desire to help the unfortunate, no doubt, but also because many of them regard the nation-state as outdated, borders as illiberal, and the line between economic and humanitarian migration as a mirage. 

They have a desire to trust the weak, much as when a fellow knocks on your door selling sponges, one desperately wants to believe he is a rehabilitated offender trying to get back on his feet, not a conman casing the joint for antiques. 

Columnists love to play this particular game. Notice how Stanley doesn’t quote from or even name any of these firmly committed radicals who wish to erase all borders and nation-states. It’s not because they don’t exist but because they are so small in number and so lacking in status or profile that he’d look ludicrous dragging them into his column. Instead, he gets to pretend that a borderless, nationless vision is common and dominant on “the Left” — you wouldn’t know them, they go to another school.

The distortion of reality that Stanley began the column with continues:

This debate isn’t just about who we let in but what kind of country we see ourselves as, hence the horror at Suella’s suggestion that multiculturalism might have failed. Straw was always a fan of the project. But even he caused a stir by asking constituents to remove their veils in his surgery, and Tony Blair once called the veil a “mark of separation”. It is rational to worry that a society cannot cohere if some groups live apart from it.

Having established the caricature of “lovely liberal Jack Straw”, Stanley underplays the former Home Secretary’s comments about the veil (he actually said it was “a visible statement of separation and difference”, echoing Blair’s language). Straw was kicking around similar rhetoric to Braverman about multi-culturalism as far back as 2000 (“We do not denigrate British history. There is a very important role for a common national culture and a common civic nationality.”)

Last week, IPSO ruled that the Mail on Sunday printed a false claim — that grooming gangs in the UK were “almost all British-Pakistani” — in an article by Braverman. The press regular said her decision to link “the identified ethnic group and a particular form of offending was significantly misleading” because the Home Office’s own research and statistics showed offenders were mainly from white backgrounds.

Braverman was walking in the footsteps of her predecessor; in 2011, Straw claimed:

These young men [of Pakistani origin] are in a Western society, in any event, they act like any other young men, they’re fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that, but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits and they are expected to marry a Pakistani girl from Pakistan, typically. So they then seek other avenues and they see these young women, white girls who are vulnerable, some of them in care… who they think are easy meat. 

Stanley brings his column to a close by pointing to “a UK poll [which] found that 66 per cent of Britons agree with Braverman’s core argument that uncontrolled and illegal immigration is an existential challenge to the West”.

A few things:

1. Stanley doesn’t actually link to the poll (by J.L Partners), possibly because it was given to The Sunday Times first and consists of a series of extremely leading phrases from Braverman’s speech such as:

Uncontrolled and illegal migration is an existential challenge for the political and cultural institutions of the West.

The unprecedented rise in illegal migration to the UK in small boat crossings has put unsustainable pressure on the UK’s asylum system and the British taxpayer.

People who choose to come across the Channel illegally from another safe country have already shown contempt for our laws.

2. Those sentences are so loaded they could blow your arm off. Notice too that “challenge” becomes “threat” when parsed through the Telegraph’s patented paranoia filter.

3. Of course people will be against illegal migration and against an “unprecedented rise” but the right to seek asylum is enshrined in international law and Braverman’s claims about those crossing the Channel being “mostly economic migrants” are disputed by the Home Office’s own figures. Drawing on that data, the Refugee Council — an NGO that works with refugees and asylum seekers — says 74 per cent of those crossing the Channel — up from 65 per cent last year — would be granted asylum if their claims were actually processed.

Leaning on polling data is undermined if it’s repeatedly shown that the information being presented by politicians and journalists is (wilfully) deceptive; scream over and over again that there is a crisis and that immigration is to blame and you’ll persuade plenty of people that it’s true. When immigration isn’t in the headlines, the ‘legitimate’ concerns we are told about so often decline in almost equal measure.

As is so often the case, there’s a Dril tweet that sums it up:

Turning a big dial that says "Racism" on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right 

Braverman loves to turn that big dial and Stanley claps like an enervated seal before reaching towards it himself.

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