40 h. ago Voting for Brexit, stopping the small boats – none of it will ever appease those who wage war on immigration | Nesrine Malik

The facts and the numbers are irrelevant: Donald Trump and Nigel Farage just find new excuses and increase the toxicityA few weeks after the Brexit referendum, a leave-voting friend of mine told me what the biggest benefit would be. “We will never hear about immigration again,” he said. If you give the people the control over the border they want, the logic went, then Brexit will finally dissolve immigration as an issue that politicians can exploit, and the country can crack on with all the other important stuff that needs doing. And, well, let’s just say that this prediction did not pan out on such a colossal level that no follow-up conversation has been necessary.Because that’s just not how the whole immigration thing works. The goalposts always move. Nothing clarifies that more than Nigel Farage getting everything he has said he ever wanted, the country heaving itself out of the EU and ending free movement, only for another boil to fester around the issue of immigration – and gue...

Events

40 h. ago Vote Brexit, stop the boats – the goalposts on immigration keep moving, and those who oppose it will never be appeased | Nesrine Malik

The facts and the numbers are irrelevant: Donald Trump and Nigel Farage just find new excuses and increase the toxicityA few weeks after the Brexit referendum, a leave-voting friend of mine told me what the biggest benefit would be. “We will never hear about immigration again,” he said. If you give the people the control over the border they want, the logic went, then Brexit will finally dissolve immigration as an issue that politicians can exploit, and the country can crack on with all the other important stuff that needs doing. And, well, let’s just say that this prediction did not pan out on such a colossal level that no follow-up conversation has been necessary.Because that’s just not how the whole immigration thing works. The goalposts always move. Nothing clarifies that more than Nigel Farage getting everything he has said he ever wanted, the country heaving itself out of the EU and ending free movement, only for another boil to fester around the issue of immigration – and gue...

Politics

8 d. ago The Democrats are in deep trouble in the US – and Labour is on the way to joining them | Nesrine Malik

When millions of once-loyal supporters become disillusioned with a party, there can only be one result: electoral disasterThe measure of a political party’s failure lies not in how many agnostics and opponents it fails to convert, but in how many loyalists it fails to preserve. The endorsement of new, unnatural voters – Latinos in the US for Donald Trump, or Tories voting for Labour for the first time – might deliver big electoral swings but is ultimately not sticky. And these votes are only meaningful if the bedrock is solid. That bedrock is the people who consistently show up, no matter what, from generation to generation, for a party. And the Democrats are losing them.In extensive research published last week tracking voter registration, the New York Times identified an alarming pattern. The Democratic party has been “haemorrhaging” voters since way before election day. In the states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost to Republicans in all of them in...

Politics

2 w. ago Gaza’s journalists are talented, professional and dignified. That’s why Israel targets them | Nesrine Malik

Recent killings have dazed the world and provoked condemnation. But little is said about the calibre of Palestinian journalismThe first time I met Al Jazeera’s Gaza team lead, Tamer Almisshal, was in July last year. His team had already buried two journalists, Hamza al-Dahdouh and Samer Abu Daqqa. The rest, he told me, were hungry. They were also dealing with trying to get hold of protective gear, threats from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the killing of family members. Ismail al-Ghoul hadn’t seen his wife and child in months and was missing them intensely. Hossam Shabat, Mohammed Qraiqea and Anas al-Sharif were asking for time to secure food in the morning before they could start reporting. Today, they are all dead.I spoke with various members of the Gaza team while writing a profile of Gaza’s veteran reporter Wael al-Dahdouh, who lost his wife, three of his children and grandson. All spoke of their work as a duty that needed to be carried out despite the risks. Three members...

Politics

3 w. ago Here’s the truth about Britain’s immigration hysteria: Starmer and co have whipped it up to get cheap votes | Nesrine Malik

He is part of a political establishment that is fuelling a crisis way beyond the point that they can ever be seen to solve it. It’s a cynical, idiotic doom loopImmigration has been a fixture of Britain’s political discourse for so long, it now feels, like Voltaire’s god, that if the issue did not exist, we would have to invent it. What would our politics look like, what would the broad majority of Britain’s media do with themselves, without immigration? It has become such a feature of the country’s political culture, it amounts to a sort of historical exhibit: “rivers of blood”, the “hostile environment”, “go home” vans, “controls on immigration” crockery, the Brexit “breaking point” poster, the Windrush scandal, “stop the boats”, “island of strangers”. And now, summer riots.What conjoins all of these is one thing: misinformation. I have banged on for years in this column about the disconnect between immigration discourse and the reality of how hard and expensive it is to enter the ...

Politics

4 w. ago The Guardian view on asylum myths: when truth loses, scapegoating takes over Britain’s migrant debate | Editorial

Labour’s cautious fixes for immigration and asylum policy face a toxic public mood shaped by fear, falsehoods and far-right provocationIn politics, numbers rarely speak for themselves. They must be framed and interpreted. They are often weaponised. In Britain’s increasingly toxic debate over asylum and migration, the question isn’t just how many asylum seekers arrive on small boats. It’s what those numbers are made to represent – and why polls suggest a large proportion of the public now believes things that are simply untrue.Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has staked her political credibility on restoring a sense of grip over the asylum system: reducing the backlog by processing cases, accelerating returns of those with no legal claim to stay and launching an as yet small-scale “one in, one out” returns deal with France. In balancing operational realism with symbolic reassurance, Ms Cooper walks a knife-edge between policy and perception. Continue reading...

Events

4 w. ago The real danger in this permacrisis is not the political drama: it’s the risk that nothing changes | Nesrine Malik

It is said the centre cannot hold, but what if it does? That’s a frightening recipe for more stasis and more rageA new party has launched in the UK, and it didn’t take long for it to become the subject of frantic speculation. Will it split the left? Will it create more of an opening for Reform UK? Should it forge an alliance with the Greens? The stunning speed with which Jeremy Corbyn’s new party amassed supporters, now standing at 600,000 in a week, reasonably makes it feel like a real and viable thing. And the next logical step is to assess its chances in meaningfully challenging the mainstream. But the bigger question is, can the mainstream be meaningfully challenged, or is the future one of increasing fragmentation, with a persistent but tense monopoly on power by the political establishment?The signs that the centre is fraying at the margins became clear at the last general election. There was a historically low turnout by share of the population (resulting in the most dispropo...

Events