United Kingdom (UK)

A commentator here drew my attention last night to a new policy paper from the Restore Britain group that has been launched by former Reform MP Rupert Lowe, who now sits as an independent MP for Great Yarmouth in the House of Commons, and who, this weekend, launched his own political party.

That party is called Restore Britain, and sits further to the right than any other likely to attract media attention in the UK at present.

Entitled Mass Deportations: Legitimacy, Legality, and Logistics, this paper claims that the UK could remove every undocumented migrant now living in the country within a few years through sweeping legal change, administrative expansion, and a deliberately hostile environment designed to force voluntary departures. 

[…]

In short, it would be one of the largest state economic programmes in modern British history, put together with the deliberate intention of pursuing hate whilst imposing threats, fear, intimidation, incarceration and violent relocation on many hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions of people.

The supposed numbers involved are staggering. The suggestion is that up to 2 million people might be forced from the UK within three years. About 75% half of those would supposedly leave voluntarily due to the hostile environment the policy would create. That environment would undoubtedly target all migrants, regardless of their legal status. It would be totally foolish to think otherwise. The remainder, the report suggests, would be forcibly removed. Official estimates do not suggest that anything like that number of people are illegally resident in the UK.

[…]

We are often told that the state is powerless. That includes the claim that it is powerless to house people, powerless to fund social security, and powerless to invest in care.

This paper implies something quite differently. The implication is that the state is immensely powerful. The suggestion is that it is capable of tracking, detaining, transporting, and expelling millions. The contradiction is obvious, but it exposes something deeper.

The choice revealed is whether the state wants to do things that are good, to which the answer from the current political establishment is that, apparently, and for reasons that are not clear, it does not, or something straightforwardly evil, which is what this paper proposes, of which it is apparently thought to be capable.

The question is not, then, about whether the state has power. The question is about how that power is used, and to what ends.

A good account of events around Robin Ince's resignation, and an answer to the obvious question that had been bugging me:

Our transportation systems shape and are shaped by attitudes, norms, and biases. Understanding how to shift these in positive directions can help address the pernicious public health challenges of traffic crashes, urban sprawl, inequities in mobility and accessibility, and other effects of a built environment that essentially requires automobile use. This experiment replicated a recent study of public health social norms in the United Kingdom with a United States sample and found similar social norms that often significantly favor cars and may obscure the public health hazards posted by an autocentric approach to planning, engineering, and policy.

A long but informative read:

According to the scholar Naomi Alizah Cohen, modern antisemitism and transmisogyny overlap in profound ways. It is no coincidence, Cohen suggests, that TERFs are so frequently to be found in the vicinity of podcasts touting Jewish “transhumanism” conspiracies. For National Socialists, she writes, the figure of the trans woman represented “the Jew’s most abhorrent creation.” Superficially, of course, all things Semitic were aligned within Nazism with Weimar-era Berlin’s demimonde of mollies, dolls, feminine faggotry, transsexuality, and transvestism.

But transfeminine people, specifically, were the figures that German fascism regarded as Jew-like because they are formed against nature — unholy mutants, like Frankenstein’s monster — and Cohen argues that the foundations of transmisogyny and antisemitism were constructed together in this era: On the one hand, there is the “natural” body of the organic, autochthonous Aryan (good), and on the other, there is the “artificial” specter of the wandering, dissimulating “alien” (bad). Trans women and Jews alike, here, belong to the domain of trickery, usury, dysgenics, placelessness, amorphousness, degeneracy, and the demonic. Aryans and cissexuals, conversely, belong to the domain of truth, earth, primal purpose, clean outlines, and palpable borders. 

Excellent summary in the wake of the UK Supreme Court interpretation of the Equality Act:

If you have strong feelings about what a woman is, that’s fine – whatever they are, this judgement isn’t asking you to change them. The court has stressed that it is not its role “to adjudicate on the arguments in the public domain on the meaning of gender or sex.” Instead, its job was to try to figure out what politicians and the lawyers they worked with meant by the term when they drew up the Equality Act (2010).

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Part of the difficulty with this area of law is that when the Equality Act was written, there was very little public awareness of trans people, and that ignorance extended to the people working on the bill. Although cases of trans men getting pregnant already existed, they dismissed these as anomalous and unlikely to become relevant. Although LGBT groups such as the Equality Network advised them of the existence of non-binary people, they felt that this was a tiny minority not worth worrying about. They were similarly quick to ignore concerns raised by intersex people, and they adopted a binary definition of sex. This would inevitably lead to difficulties as public attitudes and behaviours changed, and as gaps between the law and lived reality emerged.

In the judgement released today, the judges defined ‘biological sex’ as “the sex of a person at birth.” This is, in fact, far from a watertight definition, but, helpfully, they also referenced For Women Scotland’s rather clearer “biological sex as recorded on their birth certificate.” The judges, however, are experts in law, not in medicine or biology, and they did not take evidence from anyone in that category. They therefore make statements such as “as a matter of biology, only biological women can become pregnant,” which might seem reasonable to the average person but which overlook the fact that intersex people sometimes find themselves with inaccurate birth certificates.

This is a really useful glossary of finance terms (and regulatory instruments) for the UK, as defined in the relevant legislation and other official documents. So much distilled bureaucracy! I can't find anything like it for Australia, sadly.

Bayswater being invited to participate in the puberty blocker ban consultation so shortly after the extent of their abuse towards trans children was exposed in the press reveals two things.

First, it emphasises the reluctance of UK institutions to recognise trans and young people as victims of a climate of hate that has pervaded British society.

But it is also telling that Streeting refuses to meet with one of the only groups of trans kids organising on their own. Streeting has met with trans children, but only alongside their parents or adult campaigners. Their presence helps Streeting to maintain the belief that trans kids lack the agency and maturity to make consequential decisions.

Trans Kids Deserve Better’s slogan – ‘we are not pawns for your politics’ – challenges this directly. Bayswater’s access to power relies on rendering their children as political pawns. Its status as a parents’ group lends it authority, even though most members would never admit to their children that they are part of the group.

Not giving agency to, or legitimising the opinions of, the children whose rights are at stake suits Streeting’s agenda.

I'm reading the book at the moment, and it's brilliant. I'd already been struck by the Utopian parallels between fascism and neoliberalism, but I confess I've only just started to get a grasp on contemporary Marxist economics this year, know little about Soviet history, and have never read any Marx. [Gasp!]

The book is also a very useful history of neoclassical economics, which I assumed was born more-or-less fully-formed in the late 19th century, but apparently many key components were still falling into place until well into the 20th century.

Also this:

Almost two dozen researchers at a top medical journal have published a scathing scientific takedown of the Cass Review. Experts found that the NHS-issued report—a non-peer reviewed publication authored by Dr. Hillary Cass, a pediatrician without clinical or research experience with trans patients—was marred by “unexplained protocol deviations,” “methodological flaws,” and “unsubstantiated claims.”

Published on May 10 in BMC Medical Research Methodology, the report identified critical flaws in the study. The Cass Review led to a ban on puberty blockers targeting trans children in the UK. However, puberty blockers remain readily available to cisgender children, who may need them for conditions like precocious puberty.

“These issues significantly undermine the validity of the Cass Review’s recommendations, such that the Review fails to fulfil its aims as commissioned and should not be used as the basis for policy making,” the researchers said in a statement to Erin in the Morning.

The Cass Review has been rejected by countless medical organizations across the globe which oversee aspects of trans health care—including the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the Endocrine Society, The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Association of the Scientific Medical Societies in Germany, and the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, to name just a few.

Nonetheless, it continues to act as the vanguard for anti-trans lawmakers and leaders grasping at straws for a scientific basis to further an extremist political agenda.

For Norway, it’s a consistently rosy picture. The top 10 per cent rank second for living standards among the top deciles in all countries; the median Norwegian household ranks second among all national averages, and all the way down at the other end, Norway’s poorest 5 per cent are the most prosperous bottom 5 per cent in the world. Norway is a good place to live, whether you are rich or poor.

Britain is a different story. While the top earners rank fifth, the average household ranks 12th and the poorest 5 per cent rank 15th. Far from simply losing touch with their western European peers, last year the lowest-earning bracket of British households had a standard of living that was 20 per cent weaker than their counterparts in Slovenia.

It’s a similar story in the middle. In 2007, the average UK household was 8 per cent worse off than its peers in north-western Europe, but the deficit has since ballooned to a record 20 per cent. On present trends, the average Slovenian household will be better off than its British counterpart by 2024, and the average Polish family will move ahead before the end of the decade. A country in desperate need of migrant labour may soon have to ask new arrivals to take a pay cut.