Ancestry and Immigration in the US and UK

 

The United States is now being run as a dictatorship. That this would happen was pretty clear the moment Trump won his second term, and the Republicans won majorities in both the Senate and House. There are essentially three reasons for this. First, Trump and the Republicans have taken control of the Supreme Court, and that Court is in the process of neutering attempts by lower courts to stop Trump exceeding his authority as President. To do this they are making some very strange legal judgments: essentially the law is being rewritten to legalise a dictatorship. Second, Congress and particularly the House under the Republicans have made no attempt to oppose Trump, even when that involved Trump taking powers away from Congress. Third, Trump is much better organised than he was during his first term, both in terms of being able to place yes men or women in key positions, and also because he now has an organised movement, MAGA, behind him.

The US now has many of the ingredients of a fascist state. Large sections of the population are at risk of being kidnapped by the state, imprisoned and deported to a random country (sometimes to another prison) without due process. Tourists risk being detained for long periods. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is set to become the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government. The Trump administration is seeking ideological control of US universities, and has already largely tamed what was once called the independent media. Opposition politicians are assassinated and Republican politicians use the occasion to score political points. The government supplies Israel with the weapons and almost complete political backing to what more and more people are describing as a genocide against the Palestinian people, and sanctions international judges and agencies that call this out.

An earlier version of this post was entitled ‘US democracy is now in Trump’s hands’. It was intended to convey not only the extent of Trump’s ability to end US democracy, but also that democracy could still survive because of his obvious incompetence. I now think that is a little too pessimistic. If the Democrats can win back the House in 2026 (winning back the Senate is much less likely) by a sufficient majority, then it could become the centre of an effective resistance to Trump. For that reason, as those elections approach we will see more attempts by Republicans to ensure that they are not fair. These attempts have already begun, and merely represent a scaling up of long standing Republican gerrymandering.

What I wanted to do in this post was highlight one particular current on the US far right (i.e. the Republican party), and link it with developments on the far right in the UK (i.e. Reform and the Conservatives). Part of MAGA thinking is straight political and economic nationalism: a wish to enhance America’s military and economic power. The latter has a strong nostalgic element to it: a fondness for manufacturing jobs, and when there was more economic self-sufficiency and less globalisation. Another key element in MAGA is what some call a return to ‘traditional values’ and which I will call social conservatism.

Part of this can be simple racism, but it is more general than that. It involves antagonism to minorities based on sexual orientation as well as race, nationality or religion, and returning to more traditional gender roles, for example. It involves returning to the social values of the past, sometimes quite distant past. However social conservatism has psychological foundations that go beyond nostalgia for past social values, and are related to wanting conformity (disliking ambiguity) and having a closed rather than open outlook.

This tends to make social conservatives identify with a particular group within society, and feel threatened or uncomfortable with those outside that group. That makes them not just nationalistic, but also antagonistic to nationals who are not like them. They are attracted to right wing populists not just because they like authoritarian figures, but also because those figures talk about, for example, ‘real Americans’ rather than ‘all Americans’. The more far right politicians can focus public discourse on these minorities as outsiders, and portaying them as a threat (calling them criminals etc) the more successful they will become at attracting the votes of social conservatives.

As John Ganz points out, this viewpoint is very different from words set out in the preamble to the US Declaration of Independence, whatever meaning they might have had at the time they were written.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”

To be very simplistic, I suspect most social liberals believe in that statement even though they don’t always act as if they do, while many social conservatives do not believe in it at all.

But how to define ‘real Americans’. Race is an obvious way, religion may be another, particularly for evangelicals. Geography may be another, with small town agricultural America eulogized and large cities feared. What I find interesting about some in the US government and MAGA leadership is that they are promoting ancestry as the key to defining who ‘real Americans’ are, and crucially who are not real Americans.

Vice President J.D.Vance has for some time pushed the view that it is ancestry that defines true Americans. He talks of past generations being buried in US soil, and of a feeling of homeland felt ‘in their bones’. This sounds very similar to Matt Goodwin in the UK, who sees being English as about being able to trace your roots back generations to people who lived here. For both, a piece of paper giving citizenship is not going to suffice in defining nationality. For other right wing politicians expressing similar sentiments, see Ben Ansell here, or Sam Freedman here

Is this just code for skin colour? I’m not sure it is. After all, Goodwin himself and the far right press in the UK seem happy to talk about the dangers of white people becoming a minority in the UK at some date in the future. The days when racist sentiments like this could not be expressed openly have long gone. Instead the focus on ancestry can be seen as representing a ‘blood and soil’ type of nationalism that has a long and often terrible history. It fits with seeing the rural as representing the nation and cities as more alien. Crucially, it is exactly the kind of thinking that fits with an obsession with immigration.

If nationality is all about ancestry, then immigrants by definition can never become true nationals. They automatically become outsiders for those with socially conservative views. As immigration is increasingly viewed as inherently bad in so much public discourse in the broadcast media, this plays into the hands of those who would promote an ethnic type definition of nationality. This dehumanisation has already been achieved for asylum seekers, where the manufactured term ‘illegal’ has provided an additional way of ostracising them, and where the broadcast media showed little inclination to resist using that term.

Is Goodwin and Jenrick’s focus on ancestry just another example of the UK far right copying their US counterparts? Maybe, but it certainly involves a focus on ethnicity that only a few years ago would have been considered beyond the pale to a Conservative party led by Rishi Sunak. Moving the definition of outsiders away from just race or religion towards ancestry may have advantages for far right politicians, for two reasons. First, most people in the UK do not see race or religion alone as barriers to citizenship or being English. Second, a key part of Brexit was about excluding Europeans, who could be very white and Christian. [1]

Increasingly the Trump administration in the US is seen as a template by the two major far right parties in the UK, and much of the UK press. Newly elected Reform councillors attempt to end diversity roles even where none exist. Reform tries to mimic Musk’s DOGE. Both parties have become anti-science with their antagonism to achieving net zero. The Conservatives want to increase deportations.The converse of this, which no one should be shy of pointing out, is that this amounts to copying the policies of a fascist administration.

There is a good reason why Reform don’t like being called a far right party. It is the same reason that Trump denies he is a fascist. In both cases the labels convey much of what these politicians are really about, but which they would rather hide from public scrutiny. With their adoption of blood and soil descriptions of what it means to be English or American, we have one more parallel between them and past dictatorships that they really don’t like being compared to.

[1] In contrast, for a country like the UK, those from ex-colonies who can trace their ancestry back to the mother country can still be regarded as English or British.

Everyone knows Labour has made mistakes. What is more worrying is why those mistakes were made.

 

Every political journalist has been writing their one year assessment of the Labour government. The general view is that Labour is in crisis, “has started to unravel at a frightening pace”, and we should prepare for Farage as Prime Minister. It seems our over excited political commentariat has not yet adjusted to there not being a Conservative government where ministers and even Prime Ministers had a short shelf life, and politics resembled a Line of Duty script. The reality is that Labour will be in power for another four years, and Starmer will almost certainly be Prime Minister for another four years.

Which means this Labour government and its leadership have plenty of time to learn from their mistakes. But they can only learn if they understand not only what the key mistakes were but also why they were made. If you look at the reasons for those mistakes, then it is hard to be confident that they will be fixed.

The first major mistake, as no one who regularly reads what I write will be surprised to learn, is tax. More and more commentators have realised that the tax increases announced in the last budget, although large, were also inadequate. The most recent is Will Dunn in the New Statesman. For what it is worth, the scale of tax increases that were actually required in October were obvious to anyone who did the sums. While few among the political commentariat do sums, the Chancellor certainly should have done so.

The standard explanation for this failure is Labour’s determination to win the election, and avoid anything that could put that at risk. But if that was all there was to it, then once in power you would expect the Chancellor to grab any opportunity to row back on pre-election pledges. Those opportunities did arise, but they were not taken. It does look as if Labour believed that tax rises just to prevent the spending cuts pencilled in by Hunt was all they needed to do.

How is that possible, when crunching the numbers showed that this meant keeping levels of public service provision well below those achieved at the end of the last Labour government? One possible explanation is that Reeves wanted to copy the path trodden by that last Labour government, spending its first term demonstrating financial credibility, and only increasing spending after winning a second election. However that seems unlikely, if only because Labour wlll be under even more pressure to make pledges on tax at the next election. (I discussed here why repeating the path followed by the last Labour government will not work in electoral terms.)

A more plausible explanation is that Labour thought, and continues to think, that it can bring about sufficient improvements in public service provision by just not being a dysfunctional Conservative government. It is certainly true that the Conservative government that started in 2019 was unusually incompetent: predictably so as it was led by someone who should never have been allowed near No.10. But it was never realistic to think that better management could bring Western European levels of public service provision with substantially lower than Western European levels of tax.

A more likely explanation for why Labour didn’t think it had to raise taxes by much more than it did in October was that they accepted that George Osborne was correct: the size of the state under New Labour was too large, and he was essentially right to shrink it. This meant Labour in government would be a more competent version of a post-Osborne Conservative government. It would, for example, carry on not raising fuel duty just as every Conservative Chancellor since 2010 had done. If, partly as a result, events meant that fiscal rules might not hold, Labour would do what a Conservative government would do, and trim spending.

At which point many on the left will be saying I told you so. But this misunderstands everything I have written for well over a year, and also makes the same mistake that this government has made. The key point is not that this government holds an ideological view that the left (and even New Labour) disagrees with [1], but that it holds a view that is not sustainable in political terms. What we saw, thankfully, with the revolt over the disability cuts was precisely this. What we are seeing with Labour’s dreadful performance in the polls is precisely this. Osborne’s vision of a smaller state was never one that could be sustained politically, which is why he had to lie about cuts being all about reducing the budget deficit.

The second key mistake the government has made is to ape Reform on immigration. As with tax, this mistake is increasingly understood by more thoughtful political commentators. Just look at the result of Labour’s strategy to sound tough on immigration, which essentially just means sounding like Nigel Farage. It has meant that immigration is now viewed by voters as the most important issue facing the country. It has meant Farage leading the polls, and Labour’s already low poll share falling even further.

Starmer says he regrets one particular part of his recent speech on immigration. But the whole speech, presumably put together by his advisors in No.10, was terrible. It not only sounded like something Farage could give, it also included the straight lies that Farage typically makes. Voters will think that immigration is the most important issue if they believe that the poor levels of public service provision is due to high immigration, which is the lie Farage and the Conservatives tell. In that speech Labour repeated the same lie.

The speech did offer a glimmer of hope for a better policy. If Labour wants to accept that immigration has to be lower, it needs to pursue an intelligent approach to getting it lower, which is to focus on the causes of high immigration. The speech talked about UK firms preferring to hire overseas rather than offering training and apprenticeships. I have no idea if that is true, but if it is it represents the kind of approach to reducing immigration that might work without severely damaging sectors of the economy.

However if that glimmer of hope is to become a proper strategy, then those advising Starmer need to experience a sea-change in their approach, or go. I’m not a political journalist, so I only know what I read from those who are. The supposed success that McSweeney has had in the past fighting right wing populists seems to be typical mythmaking by political journalists happy to flatter egos for access. In my view Labour did need to largely follow the socially conservative playbook in opposition, but it was hardly rocket science to understand that, which is why I said so back in 2021. More generally, playing safe by triangulating as far as you can towards a very unpopular government is hardly a new strategy.

But it is equally obvious to anyone who thinks about it for a second that strategies that work for oppositions often don’t work for governments, because voters understandably judge governments on their record. Again ‘I told you so’s from the left about the inability of Labour in government to adopt a distinct strategy from Labour in opposition miss the point. The point is that strategies in the two situations can be different, and in my view have to be different if Labour is to survive against the right wing populist threat.

What that strategy needs to be on immigration requires a separate post, but what it has to do is easier to set out. It cannot be Farage lite or like, because Labour’s record in office on immigration or asylum will never satisfy the media, and so socially conservative voters will choose Farage if everyone’s rhetoric is the same. Labour’s only hope is to convince voters that on immigration, like Brexit or fiscal policy, what right wing populists offer is fool’s gold. This should be possible, because it happens to be true. Labour can quite plausibly argue that while everyone is promising lower immigration, only they are doing so in a way that doesn’t damage the economy. But at the moment neither their policies or rhetoric do that.

The final big mistake Labour are making is not being honest about Brexit. There is a legitimate argument to be had about how fast the UK should try to harmonise with the EU to boost trade, and in particular whether and when to rejoin the EU’s customs union and single market. Maybe Labour’s current red lines on these two make political sense (or maybe not), even though they represent a self-imposed, politically harmful brake on growth and living standards. But Labour should not as a result of these red lines avoid being truthful about the economic costs of Brexit, for two obvious reasons.

The first is that Brexit is going to get more and more unpopular over time, and so if Labour is to get a second term continuing with its red lines it will become harder for voters to understand why. The second is that Brexit is Labour’s most effective weapon against Farage [2], because even many of those who support Brexit recognise that the Leave side promised a rosy future that hasn’t materialised. In political terms Farage is Brexit, and the failure of Brexit should sink Farage, but only if government politicians are prepared to label Brexit a failure.

Calling Brexit a failure does not require that we immediately rejoin the EU. There is a perfectly respectable political argument that small steps are best. But the reason why Labour are not being honest about the costs of Brexit is the same reason they are not being honest on immigration, and that is a naive political strategy that doesn’t recognise the difference between being in opposition and government.

There is little sign that the government understands this, so there is also little hope that it will change anytime soon. It will raise taxes, but probably by only enough to put out the current fires, leaving it vulnerable to all the new fires that will emerge over the next few years. Unless it is lucky, Labour’s fiscal policy will continue to dance on a razor’s edge. On immigration it will continue to ape Farage, and that strategy will be as successful as it has been so far. By not being honest about Brexit, Labour will be forsaking its strongest weapon against the populists.

[1] To be clear, this is a view about the size of the state. Arguably this government is more left wing than New Labour in some other areas.

[2] Another great weapon against Farage is Trump, and the consequences for his actions on the US and global economy. While the attraction of UK ministers flattering Trump is obvious, that should not hold Labour back from pointing out the chaos of his rule, and the similarities in policy between Reform and Trump. A third weapon is action to reduce climate change, where the populist right have - like Trump - become not only climate change deniers but also prefer what is now more expensive energy. This is one area where the Labour government has something to cheer about, and it says a lot about the operation inside No. 10 that Ed Miliband is constantly receiving negative briefing.

Other countries' wars and the media

 

According to this article in the New York Times, Trump’s decision to bomb Iran was taken in part because Israel’s attacks were playing so well on Fox News.

“The president was closely monitoring Fox News, which was airing wall-to-wall praise of Israel’s military operation and featuring guests urging Mr. Trump to get more involved. Several Trump advisers lamented the fact that Mr. Carlson was no longer on Fox, which meant that Mr. Trump was not hearing much of the other side of the debate.”

It should not be surprising that populist figures like Trump, and earlier Johnson in the UK, should pay a great deal of attention to coverage by their favoured media organisations. They are both creatures of the media: Johnson as a journalist, Trump as a TV celebrity. As a result it is perfectly plausible that a war pursued by an ally playing well in the media should make someone like Trump want to join in on their side.

Many associate the word ‘propaganda’ with state control of the media, but there is no reason beyond ideology why its use should be limited in this way. A standard definition of propaganda is selective or biased information that is spread in order to influence people’s opinions in a particular way. It is clear that any media organisation can produce propaganda. That propaganda can be aimed at a general audience, or it could potentially be aimed at just an elected elite or indeed just one particular leader.

The ideal most media organisations say they try to live up to is to present all the relevant facts to their audience so that the audience can make up their own minds. Of course no media organisation can ever present all the potentially relevant facts and arguments, so selection is always required. The key distinction is whether selection takes place according to criteria like importance or relevance, or whether selection is based on the impression that this will leave with the audience. I can imagine how Israel’s strikes on Iran were portrayed on Fox News: plenty of favourable adjectives (‘successful’, ‘daring’), exaggeration of the threat ‘eliminated’, ignoring civilian casualties and so on. Here is a more detailed account.

In a post written during the Covid pandemic I labelled media like Fox News, or most of the right wing press in the UK, the ‘direct propaganda media (DP media)’. My reason for doing so was because so much of the media class prefers to pretend that these organisations are just like the rest of the news media except they have a more pronounced political stance. They are not. [1] The DP-media don’t produce news in the same way as the rest of the media do most of the time, but instead they produce propaganda. They select what information they provide in order to influence or flatter the opinion of their audience. Whether they do this because that is what their audience wants or because they want to alter what their audience thinks is another matter (I’m sure both are involved), but for whatever reason they try to avoid providing information that might challenge the views of their audience or the media’s owners.

Fox News knows how much Trump watches them, and that they therefore have considerable influence on him. Whether they slanted their coverage of Israel’s attacks on Iran with this in mind I have no idea, but the possibility shows why confining propaganda to something the state does is so misleading. In many of the advanced economies currently run by or containing right wing populists, the media that supports those leaders are run by independent agents (they are part of the dominant plutocracy), and they will attempt to influence the leader’s decisions just as the leader’s advisors or donors do.

Populist leaders are well aware of the power the media has to influence public opinion. That influence is often publicly downplayed or denied by those in the media and elsewhere, but I have written extensively in the past about the accumulating evidence of its power (e.g. here for the US. For something more recent on Fox see here). The power is far from absolute, but it is significant enough for any populist to want to do what they can to get this media onside. This may involve granting favours to media outlets that support them and penalising those that do not, as Trump obviously does but which Netanyahu did for Channel 14, a television organisation accused by lawyers within Israel of letting pundits and guests call for war crimes, including genocide, against Palestinians.

While the behaviour of the DP-media in war time is similar to its behaviour pretty much all of the time, the behaviour of the rest of the media covering other countries’ wars can seem quite different to its normal behaviour. While it is often called the ‘non-partisan’ media, during the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people this media has been anything but non-partisan, particularly in the US but also in the UK [2].

Analysis of coverage in the first six weeks of the current Gaza conflict in three leading US newspapers indicated a “gross imbalance in the way Israelis and pro-Israel figures are covered versus Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices”. On US television Sunday talk shows, guests were far more likely to be pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian. Evidence suggests this bias comes primarily from the media companies rather than the views of the journalists who work in them.[3]

This is why in that earlier post I called the media that wasn’t involved in producing propaganda the ‘manufacturing consent media (MC-media)’. I argued that both the MC-media and DP-media were involved in selecting information. Where the DP-media selected information in favour of a particular viewpoint within an economic, social and political system, the MC-media selected in favour of that existing economic, social and political system. [4]

Of course any categorisation of this kind is inexact, but I felt these descriptions made more sense than references to some media being non-partisan, when clearly the non-partisan media is quite capable of being pretty partisan on some issues. In particular, given the US political elite’s support for Israel and its extensive supply of arms and money, such bias would be the natural outcome of a media in the business of manufacturing consent. Anti-Palestinian bias in the US media is after all quite longstanding.

That foreign policy, and particularly wars, is an area where the MC-media feels it needs to encourage consent is hardly surprising considering that media’s coverage of the Iraq war. As Paul Krugman notes, anyone willing to face the facts could see that the US government was lying about the war, but the media overwhelmingly backed the government rather than exposing the lies.

According to Pew in April this year a majority of Americans had a negative view of Israel. (For a survey for some Western European countries, see here.) Does this indicate a failure by the media to manufacture consent? It certainly shows that the power of media bias is limited, particularly when set against views of death and destruction in Gaza, which are readily available on social media. What it cannot tell us, of course, is what this polling would have shown if US coverage of the conflict had been more balanced. However, looking at manufacturing consent as only about public opinion may be too narrow. It may also function as a means of harmonising elite opinion.

As the alleged influence of Fox coverage on Trump shows, media coverage can influence the opinions of the political elite just as the political elite can influence the media. Once we see those who run the media as independent agents rather than just enforcers of some status quo, then biased media coverage can not only reflect the position of the political elite, but it can also contribute to political elite views.

While for issues involving wars and some other areas the differences between the MC-media and DP-media may seem to be small, there remains a huge difference elsewhere between the two groups. Take Trump’s claims after the 2020 election that he had really won. The MC-media treated those claims on their merits, merits which increasingly tended towards the non-existent. Newsmax, by contrast, saturated its coverage with election denialism. We now know, thanks to the Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit, that Fox News then panicked, and started slanting its coverage to what it thought its Trump supporting audience wanted to hear. It could do that, in a way the MC-media cannot, because it is in the business of producing propaganda rather than news. 

[1] The pretense, at least in the UK, that the DP-media are news organisations helps the DP-media to often dictate what the rest of the media does, particularly through confected outrage. How else, for example, can what a rapper said at Glastonbury dominate news headlines for two days while there is no end in sight for daily starvaton and slaughter in Gaza?

[2] In the UK, for example, compare and contrast a headline in an Israeli newspaper with one from the BBC here.  

[3] In the UK BBC staff have also complained about its coverage.

[4] One way of describing this is that the MC-media controls the Overton window of views that are considered acceptable or unacceptable.