Dear Subscribers,
The week started with the Reform party announcing its intention abolish the Indefinite Leave to Remain status to help reverse the wave of migration that occurred under Boris Johnson. Farage claims it will save £234bn in the long term. It is the latest development in Reform’s immigration policy after announcing its plan for mass deportations in August.
Less noticed was the meeting Farage and Richard Tice had with the Governor of the Bank of England on Thursday. Monetary policy is generally regarded as too dull for Opposition and, unlike fiscal policy, hasn’t received much attention. Tice has criticised the Bank’s Quantitative Tightening policy and Farage has admonished the Bank’s reluctance to embrace cryptocurrencies and digital assets. Farage has even suggested reconsidering the role of the Bank since Gordon Brown made it independent from government.
A potential headache for the Prime Minister is the emergence of Andy Burnham as a contender for his job. The New Statesman ran a long drooling profile of Burnham that implicitly criticises the Prime Minister and hints at the possibility of him standing as an MP. It will generate speculation ahead of the Labour party conference this week and amidst the devastating poll ratings of the government.
Lastly, the government has announced its intention to introduce mandatory Digital Identification as proof of one’s right to work.
It has been proposed with a view to stopping illegal migration and the illegal employment practices that can ensue. The Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy was been sent out to bat and defend the logic of the proposal on Question Time.
Public backlash has taken the form of a parliamentary petition that, at the time of writing, has almost two and a half million signatures.
Media
The Times interview the Prime Minister ahead of his party conference
Notice
Oakeshott Lecture Wednesday 29th October, Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford
Philosopher John Gray will be giving the closing lecture on the English revolutionary tradition followed by a discussion with Robert Tombs.
Get Tickets here
Key Points
The political metaphor of our times is something called the ‘Overton Window’ which refers to the palatability of a political issue to electors. It is political science for what Bismarck called the art of the possible.
The most prominent issue on which the Window has been flung open is immigration. In his announcement this week Farage used the neologism ‘Boriswave’. It is a reference to the unprecedented spike in migration under Boris Johnson’s ministry. The term comes from X (like that of the Yookay), and it allows Reform and other politicians to smear Johnson’s name with mass migration.
Farage’s plans to scrap ILR have been denounced by the Prime Minister as ‘racist’ and ‘immoral’. He extended his criticism more generally of the challenge of Reform as ‘the fight of our lives for who we are as a country’.
This is part of the rhetorical groundwork Starmer is laying for his Conference Speech. He has spoken of ‘reclaiming patriotism’ from his political enemies, ‘national renewal’, and ‘building’. The recognition of a Palestinian state might also be seen in the hope of having a good conference – an attempt to placate the Labour grassroots who have one eye on the Corbyn-Sultana splinter. It is an unwritten rule of our democratic politics that the government must be seen or heard doing something.
Thus, the biggest story of the week was Digital ID. It seems that the positive case for Digital ID is less optimism than complacency: what does it matter when one already has a NI number, passport, driving license and so on? It’s 2025, after all. The Prime Minister’s Chief Secretary, Darren Jones, labelled the policy as ‘the bedrock of the modern state’. Hobbes argued that the state can only exist if people submit their freedom to the authority of a sovereign or Leviathan. Unwittingly, Jones made the Hobbesian case for Digital ID.
The arguments against are libertarian and sceptical of the state’s ability to protect data and its intentions, despite the government’s comforting and complacent rhetoric. Critics also note that the biggest proponent for this policy has been Tony Blair and his Institute.
The opening lines of A.J.P. Taylor’s 1965 English History 1914-1945 have been circulating recently:
Until August 1914, a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He had no official number or identity card.
Taylor notes this to contrast the nature of the British state before and after the first world war. We might well understand the introduction of Digital ID as the latest development in recent British history. The central government has expanded comfortably since the first world war through to the Coronavirus pandemic, smothering its opponents with a technocratic consensus.
