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Burnham hasn’t changed the game, but he has taken to the field

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Opportunity does not waste time with those who are unprepared.” – Idowu Koyenikan

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

A Go board in an advanced state - to the lay observer, it is not clear whether white or black is winning.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham took a significant step into the independence debate recently when, at PMQS, he was questioned by SNP MP Chris Law on the disparity between the constitutional mechanism for Northern Ireland formally seceding from the UK (contained within the Good Friday Agreement) and for Scotland to do the same (there isn’t one). Burnham replied that the mechanism for Scotland was “exactly the same” as for Northern Ireland.

That is, when it “seems likely” to the Secretary of State for Scotland (currently Douglas Alexander) that public opinion is such that a referendum would return a result in favour of Scottish independence, then such a referendum should be arranged.

There are a whole bunch of caveats to this constitutional clause. It is still, by far, nowhere near the democratic right to self-initiated, self-governance (c.f. Article 4 of the Constitution of Liechtenstein which allows any of the municipal councils to self-organise a secession referendum at a time of their own choosing). The clause that an independence referendum could only happen if it “seems likely” to succeed is subject to the Secretary of State not being stubbornly and wilfully blind to rising sentiment on the ground.

It has certainly been the case over the last decade of constitutional squabbling that the UK Government and successive Scottish Secretaries have been quite happy to tangle a target that they thought was unreachable only to yank it away when they realised that it might be. Is “once in a generation” the “not less than seven years” contained within the GFA? Or is it 25 years? Or is it not until every single person who voted in 2014 is dead and buried? UK Government has floated all of these positions at some point or another.

The Scottish Government is, with merit, now trying to bed the principle that Scotland should have the same constitutional right as Northern Ireland into law to make it harder for Burnham or his successor to backslide later.

It is certainly the case however that while Burnham has set a firm and reachable target now, the actual position of the goalpost hasn’t materially changed. The process of becoming independent was never path dependent on a constitutional arrangement and this remains true. The core argument should never have been “How do we get a new independence referendum?” or even “How do we bypass the need for a referendum with this One Weird Trick Lawyers Don’t Want You To Know?”.

It was always “How do we convince a majority of the Scottish population to support independence such that the pressure of their collective voice could not be ignored?”

It we win that consensus, the route to bringing Westminster to the negotiating table to agree and sign the required documents was always going to be a relative formality.

So how do we answer that important question? The key is to understand the demographics of independence. When support for independence rises, it’s not picking people up at random. It’s better to think of the kind of person who would be the next person to change their mind when support rises from X% to X%+1.

We can split Scotland into four groups of people. The “Convinced Nationalists” are those for whom independence is a core part of their identity and will likely always vote for it given the chance. It’s likely that you are one of them. The “Convinced Unionists” are the opposite – with an identity linked to the Union as a concept as strong as a Nationalist’s desire to break away. They will never vote for independence – though they may accept it as the will of the people afterwards in the same way as anti-devolutionists did after 1997. These two groups make up something between half and two-thirds of the population. Neither of these two groups are the target audience right now. Their votes won’t change.

Instead, think of the two groups in the middle – Converted Supporters who were the kind of people who began to support independence during the 2014 campaign as sentiment rose from its pre-2011 baseline of about 25% (the Convinced Nationalists) to 45% on the day. I’m part of that group. Most of this group are now pretty solid in their views. It’s a lot harder to get someone to change their worldview twice than it is to change once. I had to be convinced to support independence. Convincing me not to now would be a challenge. This is the primary reason that, contrary to some expectations, independence support did not fall back to the Nationalist baseline after 2014.

This means that the really important group are the people who sit in that realm of independence support rising from about 50% up to the Unionist ceiling somewhere near 70 or 75% and we really only need to win over about half of them.

“If an independence referendum happened this afternoon and returned a 60% Yes, are we, as a movement, prepared for that?”

When you examine the social attitudes of the Convinced Nationalists and the Convinced Unionists, they tend to be (though aren’t exclusively) quite different from each other. Support for independence is wrapped up in a lot of other fairly ideological policies such as being pro-Europe (if not always pro-EU), anti-monarchy, anti-imperialist, anti-nuclear, pro-immigration, Left-of-Centre and quite a few other topics whereas Convinced Unionists are much more likely to be opposed to many or all of these things (again, not exclusively – your individual experience may vary and there plenty of people in the Left of Scottish politics who agree with each other on almost everything except independence even if that one small difference prevents collaboration on everything else).

It’s not the Nationalists who are the isolated group though. The groups in the middle – even the Not-Yet Supporters – tend to be a bit closer in view to the Nationalists and especially to the Converteds than they are to the Unionists. In other words, the type of person who’d vote Yes at 60% is more “winnable” than the type of person who’d vote No at 40%.

We’ve talked about this phenomenon before. That the people we just barely failed to convince in 2014 weren’t ideologically against us. They actually agreed with the kind of Scotland they thought we were presenting. The problem wasn’t the vision, but the execution. They didn’t believe we’d fulfil our promises. And, frankly, who could blame them?

This is the main issue we’ve squandered over the past decade. We’ve been arguing process instead of policy. We’ve been hoping for “One Weird Trick” like a previously unknown legal route to indy or a Unionist politician standing up and say “Ah, go on then”. We haven’t really been preparing for what to do if that happened.

Seriously ask that question now. If an independence referendum happened this afternoon and returned a 60% Yes, what would be the next step? Are we, as a movement, prepared for that?

Not only do we need to be prepared, the act of the preparation is the thing that will convince the people who would bring support from 50% up to 60%. The act of preparation is the thing that will apply the pressure on Andy Burnham and Douglas Alexander that is needed for them to decide that independence “seems likely”.

In 2018, Common Weal produced our book How to Start A New Country which detailed the steps that need to be taken between referendum day and formal independence day in order to create a viable, independent nation state. It went through all of the institutions Scotland would need to set up or reform in order to take over the jobs currently being done “for” us in London. It’s still a powerful book but it’s getting on a bit and the world has changed a lot since it was written (the long version of the book is also almost entirely sold out, though you can get a digital copy here and we still have plenty of copies of the shorter version). It could use a bit of a refresh itself especially if it “seems likely” that it’s going to be needed sooner rather than later.

Next week, we’ll tell you what we’re planning to do about that.

The Common Green logo Green text on a dark green background, above a version of the Common Weal "balance" logo.

Performative Cruelty over asylum hurts all of us

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.” – Terry Pratchett

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

Buried under the higher profile news that the UK is embarking on a new push of ever-greater militarism – aiming to spend more than twice as much than it used to on the military and aiming to spend more than £10 on war for every £1 it will spend on foreign aid – is a new goal of further discriminating against asylum seekers and refugees, including those driven to flee their countries to the UK due to the UK’s own policies of spending more on war and less on aid.

The new plan is that there will be an additional tax placed on refugees who have had their asylum claim accepted that will see them bear a completely arbitrary debt of £10,000 to be paid back after they start working and earning and with any future application for indefinite leave to remain or citizenship blocked until the debt is paid.

Let’s start with the language used in the reporting around this. The policy is said to target “people granted asylum”. We have a word for people who have claimed asylum, found to have a valid claim and then asylum granted on that basis. They are refugees. This is important. Such is the dismal state of the public discussion around migration that far too many people hear the word “asylum seeker” in a manner that rhymes with “illegal migrant” and this is starting to bleed into the rhetoric on legal migrants too. There are politicians in Parliament right now who have made statements that would, if they became policies, would make it difficult or even impossible for my family to remain in this country safely.

Rather than resist the extremes of the right in the UK, the current Labour Government seems to be chasing them instead.

The full announcement of the proposed changes to asylum are here and do go beyond just that additional and arbitrary tax on migrants. Other punitive policies include significantly narrowing the definition of “family” for the purposes of human rights protections (did you flee a country with an uncle who is your only surviving relative after the war? You’re no longer “family” in the eyes of the UK Government), making it easier to subject people to slavery if they’ve found themselves with even a short custodial sentence in the UK (perhaps even due to a crime commit at the compulsion of their enslaver?) and by introducing a “legal route” to asylum that can only take place via individuals or organisations “sponsoring” a claimant which will almost certainly mean that those without the power to win a sponsor will be least able to claim asylum that they need.

There have also been proposals for annual caps on the number of admissions meaning that if you seek asylum then your ability to reach safety might depend on your arriving in June rather than in August. Welcome to Refugee Hunger Games, currently accepting applications from Districts Three through Six exclusively. Applicants from all other Districts, better luck next year!

Separately from this announcement, the UK is now also planning to bring in “age-verification technology” that they already know, from testing it, will result in children being falsely classified as adults and being stripped of their asylum rights. They also know that the tech is worse at distinguishing children from adults when the subject is Sub-Sarahan African compared to Eastern European and if they are female rather than male so this means that they are planning to bring in this tool despite knowing that it contains inbuilt, systemic racial and gender biases.

“Asylum is a right for all of us. You are not much more than one bad day away from becoming a refugee.”

Back on the £10k “success” fee for asylum seekers who become refugees. The fee itself appears to be arbitrary and only tangentially linked to the costs of supporting someone during their asylum process. That process itself can be entirely variable depending on whether someone is housed in a social house within a community, in a military barracks or in a privately run hotel that is squeezing the government and its residents for maximum profit extraction. It also entirely depends on the length of time it takes to process an application. The cuts to the Home Office over many years (likely to get worse now that Starmer is asking for even more cuts to public services to fund his expansion to the military) mean that the rising number of asylum seekers in the UK right now has as much to do with the failure to promptly process their cases and convert them to refugee status as it does with the number of people arriving. It would be entirely unfair to put the burden of “paying” for the extra costs of a service if the delays that increase those costs are due to the government, not the person.

If the £10k figure has been arrived at as a kind of average cost per applicant across all applicants though then it serves as a tacit admission from the Government that the actual cost of the asylum process is relatively small. The reporting says that the total cost of the asylum system is about £4bn per year (and this sum is likely to rapidly decline in coming years as we come off the peak of the last spike in claimants). Starmer casually announced this week that he wants to add almost four times that to the military budget. If the entire burden of these costs were placed on income tax payers alone (they aren’t. Income tax isn’t the sole tax in the UK) then this would mean that, on average, an income tax payer would see about £120 a year of their income tax go towards supporting asylum seekers and about £450 go towards Starmer’s military budget increase (on top of what is already being spent on war).

Not that the £10k repayment will actually save the Government or taxpayers any money. The Home Office’s own policy and financial assessment says as much – and their assessment of the stripping of slavery protections are likely to cost more money than they save due to the inevitably successful lawsuits.

If the problem of asylum seeking is that it costs too much money per seeker (and assuming that the problem isn’t actually that Centrist politicians are afraid of right-wing competitors courting racism and dividing society against marginalised groups) then there is a much, much better way to allow asylum seekers to support themselves while waiting on the Home Office to get its act together and that is to remove the prohibition that prevent asylum seekers from working. If people can support themselves and their own accommodation then the Government doesn’t need to spend so much money housing people in barracks or hotels.

Asylum is a right for all of us. You are not much more than one bad day away from becoming a refugee. It’s not just being married to an immigrant that brings this fact close to home for me. If you are a donor to Common Weal (if you are not and would like to, you can sign up here) then you pay me to agitate against the state. Our support for Scottish Independence is not just a political position. In some countries, doing what I do for Common Weal would be illegally promoting sedition and would be punishable with anything up to lengthy prison sentences or even capital punishment. I am literally only a bad government away from having to seek political asylum too.

This is why I’m so strident on human rights more generally. You cannot limit rights for one human without limiting them for every human. The UK is travelling a very dark path by playing the game set by right wing extremists. It only ever leads to an end where some people are declared to be less human than other humans, or to not really be human at all.