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Diary of a (Maybe) Retired Pastor

Tag: Immigration

  • This Labour Government Disappoints

    mayberetiredpastor

    This Labour Government Disappoints

    Where there is no prophecy, the people cast off restraint …

    Proverbs 29:18a Old Testament, The Bible.

    The timing of the government’s publication of its immigration whitepaper (proposed legislation) was clearly a response to the astonishing success of the anti-immigration Reform party in the recent English local elections. The whitepaper’s emphasis on dramatically reducing immigration and the timing of its publication clearly demonstrates a government that is reacting to populist feeling rather than seeking to shape national debate.

    Reducing the number of legal migrants can be a legitimate government policy but what is missing is any sign that the consequences are being clearly addressed. The aim is simply to reduce the numbers as rapidly as possible to some arbitrarily small number. The care sector has already loudly warned that reducing their ability to hire staff from overseas will mean closures in a sector that is already woefully inadequate for what we need as a nation. All year, the universities have been cutting courses and reducing staff as they try to plan around the major reduction in income as overseas student numbers plummet. Then, there is the growing financial burden of paying for the nation’s pensions. This currently represents around a half of the total welfare budget (1) and is only going to grow bigger as more and more people reach retirement age. And there is the NHS. Despite the increase in funding in the autumn statement, the NHS this year is planning to cut thousands of clinical staff in order to balance the books (2). Decimating the immigrant workforce means decimating the income tax paid by that workforce. How, then, are the nation’s pensions to be paid for? How, then, are we to pay for enough doctors and nurses in the NHS to stop playing catch-up? How do we replace the lost income of universities? How do we prevent closures of care homes?

    It comes down to money. After reducing the immigrant workforce is the government going to invest enough money into these sectors to induce the UK home workforce to take up these jobs or to cover the loss of income? But for the government to invest more money into these sectors taxes will have to rise. It is this conversation that the government refuses to have with the electorate. How much are we willing to pay in taxes so that we can have effective public services, good pensions, and reduce the need for immigrant workers?

    The Bible pithily points out that in the absence of prophecy a nation ends up in disarray. In the Bible, of course, prophecy is tied particularly to the wisdom and truth of God. But we do not need to specify divine inspiration to see that this applies in our time and place. Truth and wisdom, divinely inspired or not, is an important aspect of good government. Where a government will not offer truth and wisdom to a nation, particularly in debating public policy, there will be disarray. In the specific case of the UK, the choice between good public services and long term benefits for seniors and how much we are willing to pay, either directly through taxes or indirectly through immigration,  needs to be made clear and be part of the national debate. Instead, this government (as, indeed, the previous government) seems content to react to populist sentiment rather than lead national debate. The resulting national disarray as public services and benefits shrivel in the vacuum simply nurtures extreme and false sentiment. Many of us had hoped for something more worthy from a Labour government.

    1. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/benefit-expenditure-and-caseload-tables-information-and-guidance/benefit-expenditure-and-caseload-tables-information-and-guidance#social-security-spending-in-the-united-kingdom-and-the-welfare-cap acc. 30.5.25
    2. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/09/nhs-hospitals-england-cuts-financial-reset

  • Migrants – Who Are the Real Criminals?

    mayberetiredpastor

    Migrants – Who Are the Real Criminals?

    28 Every third year you shall bring out the full tithe of your produce for that year, and store it within your towns; 29 the Levites, because they have no allotment or inheritance with you, as well as the resident aliens, the orphans, and the widows in your towns, may come and eat their fill so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work that you undertake.

    Deuteronomy 14:28-29

    Last week, the BBC featured an article in which they tracked down the person who provided the boat in which a young girl was suffocated as her family tried (with scores of others) to reach the UK from Calais. This was but one tragic story amongst the many as desperate people risk all to reach the UK. This particular story stood out because video footage was captured of the little girl with her father  getting into the boat. They had been living in Sweden and the children had been happily settled there for years but then they were deported (1). The moving interviews of the distraught father were a illustration of just how badly wrong our immigration system (or lack of it!) is.

    The identification and running down of the smuggler (2) was an impressive piece of investigative journalism but one was left wondering what was the point?  It would not solve the family’s problems or the sadness of the siblings. It would not alter the fact that people will continue to attempt the hazardous journey across the Channel. Unquestionably, the smuggler and others like him are exploiting a situation where they offer hope to desperate people, but the smugglers have not created the situation – they merely exploit it.

    The language which is used of irregular migrants frames the issue as a legal matter. So, people providing the means of transport across the Channel are smugglers, migrants adopting irregular means of entry are illegal, and – under legislation proposed and carried out under the now last UK government – such migrants run the risk of immediate deportation to a third country (the Rwanda plan) and are treated effectively as criminals such that they are detained, denied work, and potentially, permanently denied the right to apply for entry to the UK. Making this a matter of criminal law conveniently provides a framework for justifying the exclusion of migrants regardless of circumstances and avoiding our moral responsibility to another human being. They are criminals and so they are at fault. We, on the other hand, have no fault and so are free of moral obligation.

    The UK, of course, is not alone in this approach. Europe and the US, bastions of the liberal, democratic order, take the same approach. It is a convenient washing of the hands, an excuse for refusing to develop decent, humane, well thought-out immigration policies that address the desperate circumstances of migrants and fairness to the resident population. It enables us to turn a blind eye to the underlying causes of international poverty, inequality and the impact of power politics by the self-same nations and their rivals.

    Returning to the specific issue of the Calais migrants, it baffles me that we (the UK) do not simply set-up a visa processing unit close to the migrant camps. Surely that would be cheaper than deploying boats to police the Channel, paying the French police to monitor (not very effectively) the beaches, and building a big fence! This would remove the need for migrants to make the hazardous crossing and eliminate the opportunity for the smugglers and, perhaps, no more little girls will need to suffocate at the bottom of an overcrowded small boat.

    1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68930088 acc. 6 Jul 24 13:26
    2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx77l5ej2yyo acc. 6 Jul 24 13:28

  • Interesting Times

    mayberetiredpastor

    Interesting Times

    20 “If the Lord had not cut short those days, no one would survive. But for the sake of the elect, whom he has chosen, he has shortened them. 21 At that time if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Messiah!’ or, ‘Look, there he is!’ do not believe it. 22 For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect.

    Mark 13:20-22, The New Testament

    We, unfortunately, live in interesting times as the apocryphal Chinese curse goes (1). For all their appeal to a mythical  “Great Britain” that used to be, the far right of contemporary politics is steadily eroding the ethical and moral underpinnings of the post-World War II  consensus that never again should the horrors of Belsen and Auschwitz, and the ideologies and policies leading to them, be seen. Out of that conviction the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, closely followed by the European Declaration of Human Rights, was born. Giving effect to these declarations the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) were established. But we see senior Conservative politicians openly campaigning to repudiate the ECHR so that we can treat desperate migrants in any way we wish, unconstrained by the very laws that Britain itself helped to establish after the war. The cry is that we as a nation should be able to determine what is right and what is wrong without interference by an outside body (the irony is completely lost on the Far Right!). Two generations on from those who marched in horror into Belsen this generation of politicians has forgotten that countries can go badly wrong and bodies such as the ECHR were established to prevent that from happening.

    This drifting away from the ethical and moral anchors of the post-War years is no more clearly illustrated than by the decision of the Prime Minister to absent himself from the main D-Day Landings event for world leaders.  I feel sure it wasn’t deliberately intended as a signal that Britain was now distancing itself from those anchors, but it demonstrates the relative importance in his mind, and of the advisors around him, of that post-War consensus.

    Why does this matter? If one of the major architects of the post-War consensus is seen to be now walking away from that consensus and detaching itself from the moral and ethical anchors of that consensus then others will feel able to do the same. The result is that Putin felt able to invade Ukraine and once again wage war on European soil after decades of peace. It means that Israel has been able to inflict huge suffering on civilians in Gaza with impunity in its pursuit of the destruction of Hamas. It means that the moral force of the EHCR and the ICC is necessarily weakened. Nations and their governments feel free to behave as they please without accountability of any kind.

    It is the greatest irony that the nation that had a central role in overturning the worldwide norm that slavery was simply a regrettable fact of life, and which was a major architect of the system that holds governments and nations to account for their actions  should be turning its back on the latter. These two are the diamonds in the history of Britain that could justify the epithet “Great” as the politicians of the right like to use it, and yet they are seeking to consign at least one of them to the rubbish heap of history!

    Britain has not yet broken entirely with the consensus it helped to establish after the Second World War, but one wonders if, after this General Election, the new government will seek to repair Britain’s commitment to that consensus or whether the rot which has set-in under the outgoing Conservative government will be allowed to continue. Will we hold to the ethical and moral anchors of the post-War years or will we yield to the Siren calls of those who would unleash our baser instincts?

    1. The supposed Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times” appears to have no basis in fact, or, at least, there is no record of such a curse that has been found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times acc. 27 Jun 2024 16:04

  • Abolish the House of Commons and not the House of Lords!

    mayberetiredpastor

    Abolish the House of Commons and not the House of Lords!

    So, surprise, surprise, the Rwanda Bill has become law with none of the amendments proposed by the House of Lords having been incorporated. The amendments inserted by the Lords sought to ensure that our country respects international law and protect fundamental matters of individual justice. The Lords pushed the process to the limit of their powers. They were clearly unhappy with the shape of the bill as presented by the government. But the Rwanda Bill has become so much the lynch pin of the government’s immigration policy that no amendments by the House of the Lords which, in their view, will “weaken” (i.e make less unjust!) it could be accepted, and, inevitably, the government has forced it through the House of Commons and it is now law.

    Some people will think “what’s the point of the House of Lords then?” and then think that the Lords needs radical reform even abolition. Certainly, many think that the unelected Lords does not sit well within a democratic society. Such views are mistaken. Of all the institutions  of our democracy the House of the Lords is the one that actually works! In its present form, it is intended to review and revise proposed legislation by the House of Commons. It is appointed and not elected so that it can draw together individuals who have deep experience of the many areas of civic life and expertise in the many areas of our society. It runs an “expert” and “well-informed” eye over proposed legislation and proposes amendments to improve or safeguard important principles. This is exactly what the Lords did with the Rwanda Bill. Just because the Commons decided to reject the amendments by the Lords does not mean that it has failed of its purpose. And, precisely because the Lords is unelected, the Commons always has the last word.

    Contrary to what most people think, the least democratic and least effective institution in our democracy is the House of Commons. We think we are electing MP’s to represent our views. This is false. We are not electing representatives, we are electing voting fodder for the political parties. MPs do not vote on legislation because they think it is good or right, they vote because they are told to vote by their parties. Hence, we have seen that no amendments seriously reducing the arbitrary powers of the Rwanda Bill have passed in the Commons because the Tory MPs were told to vote for it by the government. The House of Commons is not a democratic institution. It is a machine designed to provide a democratic gloss for government legislation.