Nazi No, Nasty Yes

It’s an unspoken rule of diplomacy that one does not compare one’s opponent to the Nazis except in the most extreme of circumstances. Which is what makes former Civil Service Head Bob Kerslake’s comments on Newsnight earlier this week all the more extraordinary:

From his comments, it’s clear there was disagreement and strong misgivings within the coalition Cabinet about the stance being taken on immigration policy. For a senior (former) civil servant to use such undiplomatic language is truly shocking and should not be ignored.

Way back in 2002, Theresa May had warned at the Tory Party conference that the Conservatives were increasingly seen as the “Nasty Party”. Subsequent actions show she forgot her own advice. The latest revelations by the Guardian show just how Nasty the Tories and May have become. (At the time of writing, this story has been picked up by BT.com and the Daily Mail(!!), with some automated computer-generated versions on YouTube and Facebook. The Sun has a heavily-spun account and the Telegraph has an account which effectively reverses the truth. Significantly, I can find NO reference at all to the story on the BBC website!!!)

The leak is this. On 30 January 2017, mini-May, Home Secretary Amber Rudd sent a private memo to May, vowing to give immigration officials more “teeth” to hunt down and deport illegal migrants. Rudd wrote “…I will be refocusing immigration enforcement’s work to concentrate on enforced removals.” This included diverting £10m of funding away from fighting crime “with the aim of increasing the number of enforced removals by more than 10% over the next few years”. May’s thumbprint is all over the harshening of policy. Rudd says her proposals had been “Informed by the review that you [i.e. May] commissioned whilst home secretary”. Nasty, nasty.

Heimat

A short, but hopefully relevant, diversion here. I was captivated by the epic TV series Heimat by Edgar Reitz when it was first broadcast by the BBC between 1984 and 1993. I watched the more recent repeats on BBC4 a few years ago. Warning: total playing time for the 32 episodes is fifty-nine and a half hours(!) Of particular note was the portrayal of the Wiegand family in the 1930s and 40s. The Wiegands were a (fictional) middle class family ruined by the crash and hyperinflation of the late 1920s whose fortune and status were restored in the early 1930s. Their gradual accommodation to, and subsequent support for, the Nazis is told tellingly and convincingly. The message was clear: it could happen to any such family, anywhere. (The fissures and divisions in the UK engendered by Cameron’s insane decision to call a referendum on EU membership have increased significantly the chances of something similar happening here.)

I like Germany and its people a lot: most significantly because they openly acknowledge their dark periods of history (they don’t get darker than the Holocaust), they have learnt from them and moved forward. They teach their children well the lessons learned – in marked contrast to our denial of the dark side of the British Empire. I’m currently reading an excellent book: Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire. Even the briefest of readings of any review of this book (I chose Amazon’s at random) demonstrates there is a very, very different story to tell of the effects of the Raj from the Kiplingesque one we usually hear.

Nazi or Just Nasty?

None of this makes Theresa May an Adolf Hitler. But such empathy as she does possess lies solely with the sort of Maidenhead middle classes just like the Wiegands. From her authoritarian approach and her actions, both as Home Secretary and as Prime Minister, I could easily picture her as some middle-ranking official just obeying orders to administer the Final Solution.

So a reasoned and reasonable conclusion is that May isn’t a Nazi, but she’s done more than anyone else to turn the Tories into the Nasty Party. Nasty, nasty, nasty.