Advance UK policy launch: Slopfest

Yesterday, Ben Habib’s Advance UK party held a policy unveiling event. They did not see fit to publish their new policies on their website, and all we have to go on is some photographs of Powerpoint slides. This is entirely consistent with the pathological amateurism of the populist right.

As to the actual content, we again get bullet points plucked out of a tombola, much like Reform’s now abandoned “Contract with the people”. It tells us that Habib still doesn’t really understand what policy is or what it’s for. This stuff goes down well with the party faithful, but it’s nowhere close to an integrated policy platform.

Just going on the slide above, first of the bat, I’d argue that civic pride is going to take a lot more than superficial gimmicks. It’s hard for anyone to feel pride in Britain when so many of our towns are derelict. I recall well my day out last year to speak at New Culture Forum in Gateshead, where I saw the 1990’s era regeneration is now shabby and neglected, while old Victorian and Georgian masterpieces are vacant with windows boarded up. Restoring civic pride will mean considerable investment and policing of vagrancy laws.

Essentially, you cannot stake a vague stance such as “restoring civic pride” without looking at all areas of policy, just as effective immigration policy has ramifications for just about every other arm of policy - including agriculture, foreign policy, trade, housing and labour laws. Immigration policy is more than just tinkering with visa stipulations.

Going some way to answer the criticism that (much like Reform) Advance lacks any philosophical definition, we get the following…

This puts Advance UK in the Christian cultural nationalist camp, moving towards muscular civic nationalism with measures such as banning the burka. That, I suppose, is an improvement on Reform in that we can at least say what Advance actually stands for, even if we’re not going to get any intelligent or credible policies out of them.

On the matter of immigration, Advance pledges to abolish Indefinite Leave to Remain and the party says visas will only be granted to people from countries on a Green List. Immigration from all other countries will be totally suspended. Certainly I don’t disagree with these isolated measures but I need to see much more detail.

For my part, it’s not good enough simply to reverse the Boriswave. If we’re going to save Britain from demographic collapse we’re going to need a structured programme of remigration, and if you’re not looking at remigration, you’re not even close to serious.

Then, on the matter of constitutional reform and restoration, we get the usual boilerplate shtick.

Another of Habib's hobby horses is terminating the Withdrawal Agreement. That must also include the Windsor Framework. There is a principled case for doing this, though one assumes it probably collapses the GFA. It most certainly does mean a customs border in Ireland, and will collapse the TCA.

Here we must recall that when the ERG first mooted a no-deal Brexit, they'd bet the farm on a comprehensive FTA with the USA (which didn't happen). So my first question is how does this stack up with Trump is arbitrarily placing tariffs on everyone on a whim? What's the big plan? How does Habib plan to offset losing trade preferences with the EU? What is the economic mitigation plan?

Here he doesn't get to recycle all the Brexit era WTO rules "fwee twade" shtick if we're now saying we need to protect out strategic interests such as farming and steel. As such, if the plan is to scrap the withdrawal agreement it must also run concurrently with a full agriculture policy. Also, what's the plan for the British auto industry? It's going to require a serious trade policy - and not blether about CANZUK and CPTPP. With every throwaway "accessible policy pledge" plucked out of a tombola, there are a hundred complex questions to which you need seriously good answers.

My thinking on this is that if you're going the whole hog, you're essentially starting a trade war with the EU and our immediate policy must be to bounce Ireland out of the EU. There are economic offsets we can look at such as scrapping green taxes on energy, but that also means you need a comprehensive energy policy, recognising that even the best policy, owing to decades of neglect, will not pay dividends for up to ten years.

The media will put all of these questions to Advance UK, and it will need seriously good answers but they won't have them since this isn't a policy born of actual research. You can bet both testicles that Advance will simply seek to recycle all the crapola ERG talking points from Brexit rather than developing serious policy. They've already proven they're slop merchants who think any old toss will do, so there's no reason to believe they’re capable of doing the serious work on more ambitious agendas.

On the matter of leaving the ECHR, I’ve already bored my readers at length. I do not think it is a wise use of limited political capital. In fact, I will be revisiting the subject very soon. As I’ve already outlined, leaving the ECHR has several potential glue traps, but there is more to be said on how threadbare the justification for leaving is.

I noted last year, when I set about a report on ECHR withdrawal, that most of the egregious cases come from British judges in British courts, remarking that the Human Rights Act was the real culprit. Expanding on this, I’ve happened upon a very worthwhile report that elaborates on the slop reporting we see on this issue. It notes how several media outlets misrepresent “ECHR” cases.

As I’ve remarked before, the Strasbourg court actually looks at very few UK immigration cases, with the lion’s share of the workload coming out of the British system. The report notes that very few immigration appeals are on human rights grounds.

Focus on, and so public awareness of, a relatively small number of deportation cases obfuscates how exceptional successful claims based on the ECHR are in practice. According The European Convention on Human Rights and Immigration Control in the UK: Informing the Public Debate to the latest available Home Office statistics running to June 2021, the number of foreign national offenders who successfully appealed against deportation on human rights grounds alone is very small compared to the number of foreign national offenders overall: around 0.73%. The number of human rights-based appeals allowed is also small as a proportion of the number of foreign national offenders who are deported from the UK each year: around 3.5%. Taking successful appeals based solely on the right to private and family life, the proportion is around 2.5%.

Insofar as there is a problem, the main problem seems to be with first tier tribunals. As such, it seems we need a serious overhaul of the domestic system, with new ministerial guidelines. Put simply, the case that the ECHR meaningful obfuscates our deportation policies is not made. I remain convinced it’s a matter of political will. The Tories deflect the blame to the ECHR to excuse their own lack of action. It does not surprise me at all that the slopulist right has bought this narrative hook, line and sinker.

While we’re on the subject of slop reporting on the ECHR issue, there’s very good example on GB News today. Their article claims Prison officers ‘scared’ to place extremists in solitary confinement over human rights backlash.

As it happens, there are strict rules around solitary confinement for good reason, and prison officers do need to be mindful of them. We cannot have prison officers arbitrarily using it for their own convenience. The ECHR does not ban solitary confinement. It merely sets out very specific codes of application inline with the torture convention. If prison officers are unsure how to proceed, that is a prison governance problem. An ECtHR case from 2020 upheld a prisons decision to use solitary confinement. (Astruc v. France)

Also, in R (on the application of AB) v Secretary of State for Justice [2021] UKSC 28, the UK Supreme Court held that the 23-hour daily solitary confinement of a 15-year-old child in a Young Offenders Institution (YOI) for 55 days was not inherently "inhuman or degrading" under Article 3 ECHR. The court declined to create a "bright line" rule prohibiting such confinement for minors, arguing instead for a context-sensitive, case-by-case assessment in line with current European Court of Human Rights (Strasbourg) jurisprudence.

I, for one, (having been arrested for a tweet) am pleased we have strict standards on arbitrary detention. Upholding these standards is what sets us apart from the third world. Moreover, in or out of the ECHR, Britain must still maintain high standards and not subject people to arbitrary solitary detention. Like these "ECHR" cases, these standards will be tested in a British court by a British judge using the torture convention as customary law - and will thus reach similar conclusions.

This all underscores my point that if we do leave the ECHR, some principles will still have to be codified in law and as such, it will not bring an end to lawfare. Given how police and prison officers behave, I'm quite glad of it. At most, the GB News story calls for new ministerial guidelines and prison officer training, not ECHR withdrawal.

In conclusion, Advance UK’s “policies” are all based on assumptions rather than research, and if/when we get to see the details. We won’t see a compelling prospectus.

The problem with the British right is that most of its aspirations and agendas are built on the back of crass tabloid reporting, and parties adjust their policies in line with manipulated public perceptions, thus they produce lazy affirmation tropes in place of integrated policy.

What’s particularly depressing about this is that nobody wants to see an alternative to Reform more than I do, but if it’s just going to be a Reform clone running on the exact same mentality, there is no real point in it existing. It’s especially irritating for me since I went to the trouble of compiling a whole raft of free-to-use policy options, only for it to be roundly ignored by the lot of them.

Sadly, it’s not just Advance UK failing at the most basic level. Yesterday we also saw the launch of the SDP’s immigration paper. While it has the merit of being lengthier, it’s still every bit as shallow. I outline a more coherent and detailed approach on The Manifesto Project:

https://manifestoproject.org/policies/asylum/
https://manifestoproject.org/policies/immigration/
https://manifestoproject.org/policies/remigration/
https://manifestoproject.org/policies/echr/

One ray of light this week, though, comes in the form of the Homeland Party’s Women and Children’s Safeguarding Policy. I routinely blast all the parties for their complete negligence when it comes to policy, but all I want to see is proof that a party has invested in research and done some actual thinking. It doesn't have to be War and Peace - just an indication that parties know what they're doing, how, and why, with clear underpinning moral principles. Not for the first time, Homeland has set the standard - putting far better resourced parties to shame.

It speaks volumes that Restore, Advance UK and Reform all have full time people, yet it’s the people working on the fringes (with no budget at all) providing the substance. Owing to despondency it’s some months since I did any major work on The Manifesto Project but it’s still well ahead of the game. It makes you wonder what on earth these people do with their time (apart from wasting ours).