Left behind by progressive messaging

[mtbc]

One thing that often annoys me is organizations arguing for good things but appearing to go incredibly far in how they do it. Perhaps I am becoming a blindly entrenched part of the problem but I commonly start thinking, that would be good progress, and end up thinking, I don't want to touch you wild-eyed people even with a bargepole.

Unions sometimes say things that go too far for me. I am all for good working conditions, benefits, guaranteed hours, flexible leave, etc. but I am also in favor of accountability. Sure, pay people a good wage, be patient with their life difficulties, whatever, but some employees consistently perform markedly well or poorly regardless of structural disadvantage, etc., and it should remain possible to promote, reward, penalize, or fire based on individual merit.

In more recent years, people defending defund the police as a slogan would be another typical instance. I support the underyling message but I do not think that being a victim means that one should not be criticized for using messaging that is misleading and costs the votes required to actually effect positive change.

The latest example that reminds me of all this comes from the Cornish Greens. Stuff like, No-one gets into a rubber dinghy to cross the English Channel in November unless they are truly desperate … By closing down safe routes to asylum, Patel and her government have played into the hands of the criminal gangs who exploit people's desperation to reach a place of safety.

If you suggest that just about every Conservative Home Secretary of my adult life has been a mean-spirited disappointment, that Priti Patel's absolutely no exception (especially lately), that the British immigration system has been wrongly hostile, incompetent, cruel, that everybody including Britain should willingly take, house, integrate their fair share of refugees, including under some post-Brexit Dublin transfer system, then I am right with you.

However, I am getting off that train some stops back from agreeing that people travel so far north across Europe because they are so truly desperate, that parents should even be trusted to care for children after they have paid criminals to take them on a dangerous journey from one safe country to another. Conditions in Calais are bad but, if it were simply about desperation to reach a place of safety, one need not have traveled anywhere near the English Channel in order to flee the Middle East. There already were safe routes to asylum, they chose not to take them. (Actually, judging from NGO surveys and suchlike, most do: these risking their family's lives to reach cousins, rumored easier jobs, etc. are a minority, who should still be saved from drowning.)

The Green Party's brazenly excluding the middle makes me wonder if that kind of rhetoric wins more sympathizers than it has readers dismissing them as loons. There is a compelling story on how those who need to be afforded asylum should be treated far better and that Greece and Italy should have their burden shared, we also still have a long way to go on how the US treats refugees despite the change in administration, but that story is persuasive only if it seems to be true. Whether the Greens perceive reality so differently that it is hard for my mind to meet theirs, or they are simply deploying sophistry so ham-handedly that it reeks offensively, I can only guess. However, I do know that, if I didn't already oppose the Nationality and Borders Bill, the Greens' press release would not have changed my mind, it just seems to play into right-wing talking points.

Comments

[mtbc]

Very true about the other issues, yes, what I took defund the police to really be about, more. There's something of the same issue in Britain, the police sometimes having to put the mentally ill in cells because no adequate healthcare support is available at that moment.