A Free Left Blog

While writing The Tribe I found two of my main interests, in the existential background to life and in mass immigration as a phenomenon, fusing and coming together in ways that I am still exploring and finding interesting. I think this coming-together has helped me to address one of the fundamental questions of our time in the book, namely, Why is mass immigration such a troubling phenomenon for ‘host’ communities or people? Even using this word ‘phenomenon’, which I know annoys some people in its vagueness, helps to guide us towards the sort of answers I have been coming up with. It helps because it does not limit how we address what is going on in the act of describing it. For one thing, it helps us to avoid locating the source of trouble in immigrants themselves, as if there is something wrong with them. But it also avoids locating the troubles in what I am calling here, for want of a better word, ‘host’ communities or people – as if there is something wrong with them...

When we hear activists talk about how we or they or some particular people have 'a right' to something, it can sound a little perplexing. On one hand, it sounds nice that people have a right to the good things of life, like security, freedom, material reward and the rest. But on the other the word, 'right', serves rather like a hammer, nailing down something, making it secure, which means taking away elements of doubt, of contest - of politics in other words. After all, a right is an entitlement . It moves the situation from one where the good things of life are up for grabs based on such things as hard work, ethical behaviour, greed, ambition and political power - and secures those goods from such contingencies. Political power is entrenched in a right. Any hard work can be considered done, ethical behaviour is put to one side and the human, all too human qualities of greed and ambition no longer need to be considered. In other words a human right accords a legal...

I’m not trained in economics but I do know a bit and have been intermittently digging through Karl Polanyi’s book ‘ The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time ; said to be a core text for Ed Miliband and his close political gang. Perhaps the most interesting and arresting ideas in The Great Transformation concern what Polanyi called the ‘ fictitious commodities’ : land, labour and money. I was reminded of this when reading a post by Chris Dillow on his Stumbling and Mumbling blog yesterday. Dillow's piece jumped off from the most read post on this blog – about how our immigration debate misses the main point by focusing only on economic aspects and treating how people feel as somehow illegitimate (something which is thankfully no longer the case – partly due to the excellent recent work of British Future ). In his fascinating argument to which I’ll digress for a while here, Dillow discusses how and why public opinion differs from ...

UKIP’s political ‘earthquake’ has happened. In these latest elections for the European Parliament, this party of no MPs in Parliament, no councils under its control and a seemingly substantial body of weird and not-so-wonderful candidates has secured the largest percentage of the vote and the largest number of MEPs of all the political parties in Britain.   This is despite a hugely-impressive campaign of sneering contempt from liberal opinion in Britain and latterly the mass media too – the Murdoch papers in particular. To paraphrase (and reduce) one of Bob Dylan's most cutting lyrics , something has been happening here, but some of us have little or no idea what it is, and others want to shut it down. There is a lot that could be said, so I’m just going to concentrate on what may be a bit different from what others have been saying. First up is the matter of what we might call ‘existential’ representation. Look at Doncaster for example, a place represente...