David Goodhart | The Spectator columnists & writers

How to fix Britain’s broken asylum system

Asylum is often seen as a simple morality tale—the generous spirited are in favour of it, the hard-hearted against. And we certainly read plenty of high moral dudgeon directed at the Home Office’s pedestrian response to the Ukraine refugee crisis. Much of that criticism was deserved. The lack of preparedness and then the inability to adapt quickly under pressure and allow in anyone with a Ukrainian passport, especially those with relatives here, while sorting out the bureaucracy once they arrived, was indeed dismaying. But the tale relayed for almost a week from almost every media outlet—from the BBC via the Telegraph and Spectator to the New Statesman and Observer/Guardian—of a shamefully mean UK compared with the hospitable Europeans failed to mention one salient fact: for more than ten years the EU Schengen states have allowed visa-free travel from Ukraine.

Getting down to levelling up

It is often assumed that Britain’s Conservatives are on the same journey as the US Republicans, shifting their voter base and political priorities downwards from the comfortable to the coping. There are certainly overlaps but the Republican shift seems driven more by culture, even ethnicity, than it is here. Indeed, the difference can be summed up in those two words Boris Johnson keeps repeating: levelling up. Trumpism, the erratic billionaire populism, did not seek to level. Leaning left on economics was briefly a plausible direction in the Steve Bannon era. But it never materialised. By contrast, the Tory tilt towards Brexitey, just-about-managing Britain, appears to be led as much by economics as by commitments to national sovereignty and mainstream values.

Can we stop migrants crossing the Channel?

How do we stop those pesky boats from crossing the English Channel? How about yet another reorganisation of the Home Office, that most reorganised of all Whitehall departments, as the government announced this week? This is not actually as silly as it sounds. Since the last round of reorganisations, and reorganisations to the reorganisations, the immigration side of the Home Office has been divided into three ‘directorates’: UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI), Immigration Enforcement and Border Force. It is now proposed that UKVI and the passport office will form a Services Directorate, that directly interacts with the public, and that the Enforcement and Border Force directorates will be re-merged. This is partly an attempt by the new permanent secretary, Matthew Rycroft, to stamp his authority on the department but it should also make the current cross-channel mess in and around Dover a little bit easier to handle.

Let’s use this crisis to tackle Britain’s woeful skills shortage

Training. What a turn-off. The very word casts a shadow over the page. That is partly because it has become such a specialised field, awash in hundreds of different programmes producing less and less of what we need as a society. Most policy makers don’t understand it, let alone citizens. The Covid-19 crisis is a chance to change this. The economy is on the point of a great reshaping and if the state can pay the wages of millions it can support the retraining of millions. Too much of our education and training spend now goes on 18 and 19-year-olds in higher education doing full-time residential three or four year courses. This means we over-produce then grade-inflate too many bachelor degrees. One third of graduates are not in graduate jobs, while we suffer debilitating shortages in skilled trades, construction and middle-skill technician jobs (including the vital lab staff we see on our TVs).

The age of incivility

How long ago it now seems that the big political worry was apathy. Today, wherever you look — Brexit negotiations, US politics, the latest news from Europe — the talk is only of polarisation, division and a coarsening of political behaviour and language. According to a Ipsos MORI survey, most Europeans believe their countries are more polarised than ten years ago. But are we really as divided as the new consensus presumes? What if recent political trends represent instead a long overdue rebalancing of interests after nearly 30 years of liberal domination — both economic and social — favouring the affluent and educated, and so a case of democracy not failing but working (albeit not to the taste of most of the political class)? Despite the success of populist parties across Europe, many of them participating in governments — in Rome, Vienna and elsewhere — there has been no obvious threat to democracy, minority rights or the rule of law (with the arguable exception of a divided Poland and a majoritarian Hungary).

Notes on a scandal | 3 May 2018

The idea that left vs right has been replaced by open vs closed is one of the most self-serving conceits of contemporary politics. I have never met anyone who wants to live in a closed society, but I have met plenty of people who think that the forms of openness of the past couple of decades have not served their interests. Factories and offices have moved abroad. EU free movement has brought a new workforce to compete with the one already here, and an extra four million people overall have arrived in the past 15 years, while wages have barely grown. Combine that with open public services and an estimated illegal migration population of at least 500,000 and you can see why so many people have not needed Nigel Farage’s help to worry about borders.

Continental divides

What do Europeans really think about Brexit? Do they secretly admire our unexpected decision to walk away from all those pesky regulations and sub-committees? Or are our former ‘European friends’ relieved the arrogant, entitled Brits are leaving them alone? The official response of the European political class is one of regret combined with studied indifference and a determination not to let Brexit weaken the project. That, broadly, seems to be the unofficial response too. The EU, after a couple of decades of declining popularity and a rising populist challenge, has actually seen a small up-tick in popularity since Brexit, according to the Eurobarometer polling organisation. Trust in the EU stands at 42 per cent, ten points up since 2015 and the highest level since 2010.

Europe remains remarkably free of racism

This book is an exercise in crying wolf that utterly fails to prove its main thesis: that Europe is abandoning its core liberal values under threat from a resurgent populist right. It is a largely fact-free polemic that passes itself off as an open-minded work of interview reportage. Yet if you can ignore the author’s sly interventions on behalf of his left-liberal premises, he does introduce the reader to a fascinating cast of characters, mainly from the European populist right. And, at least for someone (like me) who is predisposed to an interest in the subject, he also provides real insight into the internal debates about immigration and national identity, above all in France, the Netherlands and Denmark, that you could never glean from reading the newspapers in the English-speaking world.

Racism is a grey area

This book is an exercise in crying wolf that utterly fails to prove its main thesis: that Europe is abandoning its core liberal values under threat from a resurgent populist right. It is a largely fact-free polemic that passes itself off as an open-minded work of interview reportage. Yet if you can ignore the author’s sly interventions on behalf of his left-liberal premises, he does introduce the reader to a fascinating cast of characters, mainly from the European populist right. And, at least for someone (like me) who is predisposed to an interest in the subject, he also provides real insight into the internal debates about immigration and national identity, above all in France, the Netherlands and Denmark, that you could never glean from reading the newspapers in the English-speaking world.

Middle May

Once, politicians remained in their safe spaces and elections were fought in a handful of swing seats. This time Theresa May is campaigning in Labour heartlands, pitching herself at people who have never considered voting Conservative before. Tories are targeting seats they have not held since the 1930s and social class seems almost irrelevant. Pollsters YouGov recently observed that class now tells us ‘little more about a person’s voting intention that looking at their horoscope or reading their palms’. As Tony Blair might have put it, the political kaleidoscope has been shaken and the pieces are in flux. A picture of a Britain with new fault lines is emerging. To begin to understand what is happening, one must accept British politics is now as much about values and meaning as it is about money or class.

Is the Front National the acceptable face of populism?

Is the Front National the acceptable or the unacceptable face of populism? It was one of the few points of contention in an absorbing 90 minutes of discussion about the meaning of the French presidential election, expertly conducted by Andrew Neil. The day before Wednesday’s Spectator debate I had heard the celebrated French intellectual, Bernard Henri-Levy, regretting the fraying of the 'Republican front' against the 'fascist' Front National. On Wednesday night at The Spectator event, Dominique Moisi used the same term. Fascist? Could more than a third of French voters be about to vote for a fascist party? At least one man in the audience who, daringly, confessed to being a Front National supporter challenged this view of the party.

Does Brexit mean England can have Englishness?

Brexit is often said to be driven by English nationalism. In recent decades England has certainly become a less shy country, made aware of itself thanks to the growth of Scottish and Welsh national consciousness and the banal fact that we now talk about the English NHS, English schools, and so on, in a way that we never used to prior to devolution. Yet on today's English national day I saw not a single flag of St George flying on the train journey from London to Cambridge and back (travelling through Essex, supposedly one of the heartlands of English nationalism). And when I opened my Sunday papers I found no reference to it at all. (Though Jeremy Corbyn did briefly grab the lead item on the BBC News with his suggestion of a national holiday on St George’s day.

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