TRASHFUTURE - Concrete Island feat. Daniel Trilling

Episode Date: October 19, 2021

We had journalist Daniel Trilling on the podcast to discuss his research into The Home Office - how it became such a strange, cruel, dysfunctional department, and how it fits into the larger cruel absurdities of immigration policy in western countries. Also, we talk excitedly about Matt Hancock’s new appointment to the UN (…we got the bad news a couple days after recording). If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture If you’re in the UK and want to help Afghan refugees and internally displaced people, consider donating to Afghanaid: https://www.afghanaid.org.uk/ *MILO ALERT* Milo Edwards comperes a stellar line-up of professional acts trying new material, headlined by Archie Henderson. See it on 26 October at 19:30, Sekforde Arms, London EC1R 0HA: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/smoke-comedy-featuring-archie-henderson-tickets-188961367537 And check out more Milo live dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Good evening, I'm Milo Edwards Brackett's future and it is my unfortunate duty to report to you that since the time of recording, the UN has in fact rescinded Matt Hancock's offer of a job. Welcome to James A. Caster Future, but we're all James A. Caster. That's right, we're all here and we're all James A. Caster, so let's crack on! Either you two are James A. Caster? No, I'm not. I don't do voices.

I have the same voice as the White Face and I respect that. I'm going to do the only voice I can actually do effectively, which is everyone on the Twitch stream knows is Newman from Seinfeld. And I'm going to say to our audience, a very warm hello Jerry. That's right. We're here with Newman from Seinfeld. What are my favorite characters? This is going to be such a contrast to the segment that where we talk to journalist and author Daniel Trilling about the history of the home office and how immigration policy in Britain got like it is. Yeah.

It's James A. Caster, James A. Caster, a brutal racial violence James A. Caster. That's right. That's the James A. Caster sandwich we're making for you. Let's talk about it in the question. In the TF Dark Kitchen tonight. Yeah, actually up to on the subject of James A. Caster, I'm going on a stand up to which I'd like to plug at the top of the show. Is it with James A. Caster? It's with James A. Caster.

It's me doing this voice on stage. I live in Russia. Let's crack on. Let's crack on. You can come and see me in Birmingham on the 23rd of November, Liverpool on the 24th of November, Manchester on the 25th of November and hopefully Glasgow on the 26th of November, but that's not yet certain. So there will be a link to my events page on my website in the description. Crack on over there and buy tickets. You veered into Michael Cain territory.

Listen, that reminds me actually there is also and it's more appropriate in the Michael Cain voices. There will also Master Bruce be a date in London. There's going to be a smoke at a second on the 26th of October. It's a lot sooner. It's in London. The headliner is going to be Archie Anderson. So if you're not a tarte, get yourself down there. The link with the tarte is also on my website.

Also, if you're a tarte, get yourself down there. Also, if you're a tarte, we don't mind tarte standing there. No. Boy, this is going to be a jarring shift in tone in about 30 minutes. Like a ski slope. Yeah. Anyway, look, we've got a few things to talk about before our conversation with Daniel. Matt Hancock alert.

Chiefly James A. Caster. No, there's the Matt Hancock alert. Matt Hancock. Shit. We're seeing the Matt Hancock. The big Matt Hancock news ticker that we installed in the studio. Matt Hancock symbol has been beamed into the sky. Yeah.

We're just getting a big like fucking. That's right. Matt Hancock symbol is just a dog staring open mouth in Alexa. It's just a silhouette of Matt Hancock running. I found out via an alert on the Matt Hancock app, Matt Hancock. Yeah. But it's still running, by the way. You're on what some call a weird Matt Hancock MP.

Yeah. That's right. The influx of the something awful people are posting. So, look, Matt Hancock has been announced. He's a comeback. He's a special representative for financial innovation and climate change for the UN's Economic Commission. He's going to like, he's going to get Africa as a continent into NFTs.

Yeah. He's going to become a micro banks guy or a micro loans guy. Just fantastic. This is everything we've ever wanted for Matt Hancock. It's for him to be kicked upstairs to a do nothing job at the UN. It's awesome. That's like, it's like a happy ending for him. You know?

Oh yeah. I mean, this is literally the best it possibly could have gone. Like good ending, you get a do nothing job at the UN. Bad ending, you and Nick Clegg and you work for Facebook now. Yeah. Like those are your options with British politics. I'm bringing caramel waffles to Uganda. So, but it's also like, how on earth does he just keep getting jobs?

Yeah. People look at them like, this guy gets stuff done. Come on. Because the UN and like envoys to the UN have you sort of as like an official joke. And so it's just a nice place to put him. It's like the farm where you claim to send a dog that you're putting down, you know? He's going to have lots of room to run around and play and suggest micro banks to people. And he's going to be very happy.

Also the other cool thing. Okay. So number one, right? If you think of the timeline of events, right? What happened here is he does the weird, he gets like, you know, shit canned for the ultimate crime of basically getting pussy. No, he's getting pussy. Shit can for that.

The ultimate crime. Never do that in government. Do not get your dick wet in the home. Yeah. He got his dick wet and that was unforgivable. That's right. But then I think then he leaves, but he must know something. I think that, you know, remember the weird video of him walking through his constituency

that if you mainline Matt Hancock content like us, you would have seen. I think that was his version of the Kevin Spacey. I always thought I could earn your trust video. Are you saying, are you saying that there's like a separate but parallel Illuminati for dumb guys? I think that is what I'm saying. He's like, he's like, you got to let me back in or I'll blow the whistle on everything. But it's just a succession of dumb guy conspiracies.

Soft play. Little St. James Island. There's like a big ball pit. Well, little St. James Island already had a soft play. Kind of like the B-plot of, of Eyes Wide Shut. So like the group, the group of guys who just like going to the parties to like hang out with each other and catch up with like. But also like the thought of Matt Hancock now living in New York is very amusing to me.

He's going to wander the halls of the UN. Like timelines converge on a singular moment, a singular moment of Matt Hancock wearing a UN peacekeeper helmet because he asked if he could try one on and no one had the heart to say no to him. I am looking forward to that so much. He's going to really love New York. He's going to be like one of those British guys that's just really fascinated by like Apple beers and like Hoosier Hooses in Union Square.

He's going to get lost in the M&M store in Times Square. It's so exciting. He's going to be like the M&M portion. The portion sizes are so, the portion sizes are so big here. I can get a big golf. Oh shit. He's going to be doing the US office joke of his favorite pizza place in New York being a sparrows.

Yeah. He's going to go to, he's going to go to the M&M store in Times Square and be like, I love sightseeing in New York City and then drown in a big vat of M&Ms. Awesome. But I think like the plot of Home Alone 2 is happening to Matt Hancock. Even as we speak. He's going to make Donald Trump. I've always said that Matt Hancock, I've said this before that Matt Hancock, the only

explanation for Matt Hancock is like a kind of big, like a Tom Hanks big situation. Oh yeah. He's now even more closely doing the plot of big and he's, because he's working at, you know, a toy store for lanyard people, which is the UN. He's just, he's just there. He gets to play with like, this is a, this is a micro bank that works on the basis of an app and you take a picture of it. Like he is going to learn.

He's going to meet so many like, like fine fintech guys. He's going to be Dan Ariely, almost certainly. I think this is going to be so educational for Matt. He's going to like come home after a long day at the office and be genuinely excited that he met a guy from Korea. Yeah. He's, he's going to be, he's going to learn like, he's going to, he's going to have his favorite bodega.

He's going to be so happy. He's going to learn so much about different cultures at the UN. It's going to be fantastic. I want to see his like what I did in my summer job report. This is a great opportunity for us because we could convince Matt Hancock on the Muammar Gaddafi division of Switzerland idea and make him present it again. I, I'm just, I'm, I'm fully in head of year mode. Just like, I think this could be really good for Matthew.

Yes. A hundred percent. I look, people are hating because they hate to see a pussy get a thriving basically. That's I think what we're saying. Yeah. Of course. Of course. Because there is no like, there is no better time.

There's no better time in place to be in New York than if you have a high paid, like nothing job. Do you think they'll give him like diplomatic plates? Oh, he's going to have so much fun. I think they might do, but like he's basically going to like be living the dream where he's just like, he has a nothing job where he gets paid like a shit ton of money for it. And he just gets to spend the rest of his time like hanging out in like Manhattan, like the lower East side and like getting pussy.

Like, I don't know. I just went to this club called The Box. The view from the U.N. building is incredible too. So like, if you know, if you can survive all of the like asbestos in there and the fact that it was built to 1950s specifications, you're going to have an amazing time. I can just imagine him now just pressing his face up against the glass, staring out at the river, just being like, wow, the big apple, the city that never sleeps. And he's going to, he's going to like, he's going to go have tea at the Plaza like Eloise.

It's going to be great. Matt Hancock is going to go and have, have lunch at the American girl restaurant where they'll see you with a little dolls. And he's going to try to be talking to the doll about opportunities in fintech. I mean, the fact that he is basically like, you know, being up, we've appointed a guy who is again, like a dog who has the mind of a golden retriever to be the representative for financial innovation and climate change. Like not one of those is not important enough to have its own fake job.

His previous job, his immediately previous job was UK government minister for not killing your nan. Right. And suffice it to say, didn't do so well in that job. So this is like, perhaps maybe solving climate change is more a challenge that sort of up to his family. Don't forget though, it's a UN special envoy for, for, so it's, he's not actually going to solve his job.

Maybe looking into reports about how we could theorize about how to form a committee that could embrace innovative new ideas that could deliver a series of marginal improvements and how we address climate change. With crypto. With his speed. With crypto. With crypto. With crypto.

God, he's going to meet a crypto guy in a bar in New York and he's going to lose all of his money immediately, but then he's just going to luck back into it again. One of those NFT dogs, but it's wearing the UN peacekeeper helmet. Oh, NFT of Matt Hancock. I would buy that. I hate as much as they hate NFTs. I would buy one of Matt Hancock. He's going to become really good friends of Dave Portnoy.

He's going to start a podcast with him. Matt Hancock. Kind of web the end game. Yeah, Matt. No, Matt, kidding. Matt Hancock going on like cooking dinner with Frank the tank. Perfect. In fairness, in fairness, Matt Hancock could go and call her daddy because he knows about

getting pussy. Yeah, that's true. What's fascinating is this man invented the tank. So, but the other thing right is let's talk about the timeline of this, right? So Matt Hancock is fired for being a classic Casanova. For the crime of getting pussy. He's fired for having confidence basically. Yeah.

And not leaning in. For being an alpha. Yeah. He's fired for being too alpha. You're being a sigma because he transcended the boundaries of morality. In order to exercise masculinity. Matt Hancock is a sigma. Matt Hancock.

No. Number one, Matt Hancock basically oversees probably one of the public health elements of the worst public health crisis in, like, remember British history. And that's fine. Yeah. But then, and so he'd be the minister for kind of killing statistically probably killing your Nan if she's in a care home. Then, even if she's alive, then, you know, as gets asked in a sigma fashion is for

him, is fired and then gets makes this video of him walking around his constituency having like weird arms length conversations with people who just wonder why he's there and then gets offered this job, but then chooses to announce it on the day that the report into the British government, British States failings on handling COVID is released. I love the health secretary wasn't I but that's I want to talk about that for a minute as well, right? Because the report basically says every wrong decision that could have been taken was and we sort of know that and we knew that at the time.

We still know that now the only politician shaking hands with COVID patients. Genuinely, my favorite part of that was Boris announcing that and then almost dying of COVID. Oh, very funny. Shake hands with everybody. But shake hands with danger. But then right overseeing this, but the report, the scope of this report basically says, look, we were we were unprepared. No one seemed interested in being prepared.

There was this sort of group think among MPs who weren't interested in any kind of, you know, preparations for any of this actually happening. And then there was the decision to discharge all of the sort of old people with COVID into nursing homes, turning them basically slaughterhouse having sex with blokes. So running disaster preparedness exercises so you can hang out with more dudes. The report itself, right? I think it actually papers over the real problems, why it happened like it did. And I sort of go back to the reason that COVID hit Britain so hard partly is, well, wait, how come we have

bed blocking, right? In the NHS where if your old people will just basically live in a hospital because there's no word that the place can legally send them. How come we sort of, we have this... Because what happens is when you do at Learism and you plunder your empire to make one social safety net, the NHS, it then becomes tremendously popular and you have to preserve that name at least even as you're sort of rapaciously defunding it. And so it becomes a sort of social service of last resort and it catches everything else

that falls in between all the other things that you should be doing. And you end up with people just occupying hospitals. We've said this before, but it's government by kaplunk, right? I just keep pulling out sticks and seeing if it still works. And I think the fact that this report does not talk about... I mean, look, is it going to talk about the overall neoliberal mindset of sort of slowly running down society as a going concern and then kind of shrugging when your society has to respond to something and it can't because you've run it down?

Fine, but it didn't even mention austerity, right? The fact that that was not front and centre. The fact we have basically defunded everything. There's no way we can deal with all of these people in a way that they need to be dealt with politically. The labour market certainly isn't going to fucking do it. And so there was this shitty ad hoc, backward-looking response to this enormous public health crisis because that's just the logic of the state that we live in. The really fun thing, right, is doing this report now and doing this report at a time.

It's like saying, okay, I'm going to investigate the fire because I've got it out mostly in this room. I've kind of got it tamped down and the flames lick up the windows from outside because we managed to do... In England particularly, you managed to do lockdown without actually locking down, which was a fantastic move. And one of the things that, and also, on the other hand, vaccinate lots and early and what these things conspired to do was to make it so that everyone got bored of COVID at about the right time that things seemed to be going back to normal or whatever just in time for us to get hit with massive supply chain collapses,

which fucking could not have planned it any better. Oh, and of course, on the subject of the supply chain collapses, our wonderful, fantastic independent Bank of England has decided they're going to, again, try to... The extent to which you... Okay, I'll take it back for a second. One of the reasons that the COVID planning went so poorly in Britain was that everyone just sort of told themselves what they wanted to hear, which is, well, this is basically a flu, it'll be fine, we don't have to do much.

And it means that they prepared for what they wanted the problem to be, as opposed to what the problem was. And it's almost the same thing happening now with the shortages. We are fixing the problem we want to fix. It is the same thing because it's the same crisis. There's no border in between those things. We're fixing the problem we want this to be. And so, for example, the Bank of England is our wonderful independent central bank

is going to raise the base rate, so this is how... The base rate at which money gets lent at from 0.25 to 0.5. Cool. And I think that it seems sort of stupid and technical, but I think it's worth going into at least a bit because if you... It's like when you see a DJ turn one knob and you just go, ooh, that's going to make a big difference. Okay, sometimes it does.

What's you doing that for? It's going to be something. Look, sometimes that does make a big difference. It depends on what kind of cause we have. The Bank of England just going shout out to his family. More or less. So, one of the ways that money is actually created is through commercial banks making deposits through loans to people and businesses.

If you get a business loan of 100,000 pounds or whatever, the bank doesn't have that 100,000 pounds sitting around. It has some of it, but not all of it. And so, they create a deposit in your account and then you have to undertake economic activity to generate that 100,000 pounds to pay it back. And then, hey, Presto, 100,000 pounds now exists where it didn't before. And then that can go into the bank's capital

and then they can lend out more money on the basis of that. Right? That's sort of how that works. And so, with the base rate, by rising the base rate, the banks make a profit on the spread between the base rate that the Bank of England charges and what they charge you. So, if they charge you 1%, Bank of England charges 0.5%, their profits 0.5%.

And they're not going to take less profit. But the Bank of England raising the rates does, is it basically means that, because they're saying they're only able to pull that one lever, but that's really one of the more important levers. And that's the main economic lever we've decided that you should be allowed to pull. That's our freedom of movement is raising the rates.

Because that enables or constrains business activity. And so, what they're doing, in response to a crisis of material shortages, of material shortages pushing prices up. So, that's where inflation comes in. Because you need more money to do something if fuel costs more. So, that's how inflation really happens. It's a price phenomenon.

And so, what they're doing is they're saying, we're going to, there's a threshold of businesses that will happen or not happen based on how much credit costs. And so, they're saying, we're going to reduce the amount of activity in the economy, which, if your problem is a, is a literal physical supply crisis,

seems fucking ludicrous. Awesome. Yeah. And I mean, right now, right, Merisk is no longer docking ships at Britain's main port. They've just stopped docking new ships. Because there's no one to transport the stuff. Love to start docking.

Yeah, there's no more docking. Britain has finally banned docking. Right? And I think the other thing that's important to point out here, is like, yeah, Brexit's exacerbating this, but the crisis is everywhere. America's not going to have its treats for Christmas. And, you know, it's,

what a lot of the interest rates sort of stuff like that does, the fiddling with the interest rate, why it's important, is that it's supposed to signal to business to undertake such activities as will control inflation. I'm poking business with a big stick, come on, generate economic activity. Or generate the right kind, right? Yeah, because the, and so,

but that doesn't make more food happen. It doesn't, it doesn't like build a flood barrier. It's almost as if, if you want stuff to get done, you need people, you need labor of some kind. Yeah, it's not just, but that's what I mean, is they're stuck solving the problem that they wish it was. Yeah, because that's the only kind of economics we can do,

is economics that doesn't, some kind of like theory of value. Not that one though. Anyway, we're only doing free economics. I notice we're actually coming up on to, on to time, especially including our conversation with Daniel Trilling, which is going to happen now. So I'll hand off to other Riley.

Yeah, future Riley from the past. Future Riley from the past. Future Riley, why are you wearing that weird like cyber headset? All that one side of your face. All right, see you in, in the next segment everyone. Thanks past Riley. Other Riley from the mirror universe, who has definitely very sort of cleanly handed off the recording to me,

so that I may now have a conversation with journalist and author, Daniel Trilling. I miss past Riley about the home office. Daniel, how's it going? Good, thanks. So you've written, this is actually, you wrote an article a little while ago, a long read, all about how the home office came to be what it is today.

And I just wanted to know if you could give me a little introduction to, could you turn that long read into a short listen? Yeah, you go ahead and summarize and make that audio. Okay, I'll give it a go. Yeah, so I've been covering immigration and asylum for quite a few years as a journalist. And I suppose the idea for the piece came partly from the fact that if you speak to anyone who's dealt with those issues in the UK for any length of time,

there's a kind of common sense of frustration and maybe even amusement the way the home office will behave. So obviously, we all know that British politics has got a particularly toxic kind of discourse around immigration. You've had years and years of home secretaries and other prominent politicians promising to be tougher on various aspects of border control and immigration policy. But perhaps the kind of, and therefore you would expect the home office to behave accordingly.

But I think the bit that people often find very puzzling is that it very often will behave in these completely self-defeating ways. So I don't know, fighting hopeless court cases all the way up to the appeals court for instance, when it knows it's going to lose and is going to have to do what the judges tell it in the end. That interests me. And the thing that I kind of wanted to pull out from your article was the home office's success rate when it takes people that it wants to deport to court is about 40%,

as I understand it. And they take a lot of cases that they're not prepared to defend, that are sometimes literally indefensible. But the impression that I get is that they seem to do it so that they can wash their hands of it and so that they can say, oh, well, it's not our fault. We've been trying to do the nastiest possible thing. It's the courts. It's the woke lefty enemies of the people judges who have taken this rise away from us.

Yeah, that's definitely a big part of it. I think the other part though is that even when the home office then is set up to do something where the politicians really want it to be nice and open and welcoming and facilitate things happening, it still behaves in the same way. So like the Windrush compensation scheme is a really good example. I can't imagine that any politician actually wants that to be administered badly and to be as hostile as it is being to people who've already been mistreated really severely by the British state.

But yeah, it just happens. Or there was a story. Just reflexive. Yeah, there was a story I saw earlier today about one of these last minute panicked visa schemes that the governments introduced for lorry drivers and agricultural workers. I think it was the lorry drivers visa. Only 20 people have been granted visas so far out of the 5,000 that they're trying to recruit before Christmas.

And one of the reasons for that is that the home office is just sticking to its three-week turnaround time on the visas. So physically cannot help themselves. That's almost, if it weren't so evil, it would almost be admirable the way in which it's so self-defeating. But I guess the other thing there is the staff culture. And that's another thing that you get into a bit is the culture of refusal and the need for very fast refusals and to refuse more migrants than you accept and things of that nature.

It's very funny that the home office, whilst it does have many deliberately evil policies and intentions, also simply falls victim to the same thing that plays every business in this country. No one that walks there wants to do their job ever. I was just going to say you've got all of these kind of puzzling questions about it. This way of behaving is either very frustrating or it kind of makes people laugh even if it's kind of laughter and desperation when they're trying to deal with the system. But the bigger question is why has it got like that?

Presumably the people that work there don't get up every morning thinking, I want to go into work and administer a really bad system even on the terms that I set for it. Five, ten percent tops. Yeah, you know, you do get some. I mean, to be honest, I've had jobs where I've felt like that about my job. So the question is really kind of, was it always like that? How did it get to be like that over the time? And that's the piece that I wrote for the Guardian earlier this year was really trying to

dig into that. And I think what we were trying to do that we felt hadn't been done sufficiently before was why not ask the people involved in building it and the people who run it and see what they have to say. So the research I did for the piece was just basically trying to speak to as many people who had worked at the home office or do work at the home office as possible at every different level of the department. And I was interested.

Did you get through? I mean, it worked to some extent. I think the useful detail there was that there are a lot of people who have previously worked at the home office and now have quite strong thoughts about it. You have to imagine it disillusions people quite efficiently. Yeah. Well, I mean, what was interesting to me was to hear how people rationalized what they did.

People who acknowledged that bits of the system didn't work very well and would want to explain more, here's how I or we tried to improve things. Here's the fundamental reason why it didn't get better. Very often that would come down to civil servants would often want to blame the politicians with quite some justification there. Politicians would want to blame either the civil servants in terms of their working culture or just the way the system was set up. And they kind of had a point there too.

But I suppose there was always and most people I spoke to were, I think, less willing to acknowledge the sort of fundamental problem, which is that the whole thing is at least talking about this is talking about the home office is some, you know, the department, the police is immigration specifically, because obviously the home office does lots of other things as well. But the promise that governments constantly make to voters is that you can have a system that gets rid of the bad immigrants and keeps the good immigrants. And that's if you start from that point, you're going to create a system that is a complete

nightmare, basically, because that distinction does not really exist in reality in a way that politicians and the media constantly tell people that it does. I think the interesting thing I think about the home office, right, is that it is, if we want to look at this in sort of much broader context as well, a lot of the kind of, you might say, Western project for the last several hundred years has been to make the rest of the world pretty unlivable and use that to make our country super livable. And it's like putting yourself at the bottom of a, it's like digging down a river so that it creates a waterfall and then being mad when the water comes over.

If there are higher wages and better public services and so on and so on in your countries and you exist in other places, then people are going to try to move to yours. It's all just like gravity, right? And so then we have this, we have this impossible thing where we have to resist, like we have to resist what is essentially almost a natural force. We have to make a big show of resistance. Speaking of being self-defeating, speaking of being self-defeating, we can't stop making individual foreign policy decisions that hasten that or intensify it.

Indeed. We cannot stop ourselves from doing individual acts of, say, regime change to pick one example that make countries impossible to live in and make people desperate to leave them. Well, what about all these cats and dogs coming over from Afghanistan? So the way I think about it, right, is that this is an impossible situation that we've created. And all of those places where reality has to rub up against ideology, where the circle has to get squared, where the contradiction lives, we just pile them into the home office.

Where we have to, all of a sudden, we have to, at that system, world system level, there is that contradiction of livable and unlivable. Then within government, there is the contradiction of the fact that the treasury and bays quite want more immigration because they understand that that's kind of what the economy, our economy kind of runs on, especially foreign, cheap labor, and like GDP is largely a measure of population growth as well. And then on the other hand, and so you have to constantly have people coming in who all want to come in, but you need to make a big show of not letting anybody in.

And I think the reason that home office policy fails so much beyond the individual sort of systemic failings within the office itself is that it's set up to do an impossible task. And so all it is able to do is bluntly administer cruelty because, and I think one thing you capture very well in the piece, is that it's basically outside of political control. I think one of the reasons that the Windrush compensation scheme was so poorly administered is that I don't really think that the home office reports to any politician as much as they report to the Barclay brothers, Rupert Murdoch, and Viscount Rothermere, basically. Yeah, I mean, saying it's outside of political control is true in one way, but I suppose if

you look at it the other way around, it's the most highly politicised department of them all, and therefore operates to a logic that even the politicians can't really shift when they try to. I think I just want to go back to like the early... Democratic control, sorry, but yes, you're right, at least carry on. Yeah, just going back to that kind of idea about it also has to hold the... I think that's absolutely right, that it's got to hold all of the contradictions of government and then hold all of these...

The contradictions of Britain's role within the world, which I think is very true, although I think I'd put it slightly differently to how you were all putting it. I think it's important to be careful about framing migration as a kind of retroabution for things that a powerful country like Britain has done wrong in the past, partly because that makes the migration itself look like the problem, but also because I think there's a lot more going on than just that, so yeah, if you're talking specifically about people who are displaced, so refugees from Afghanistan, for instance, that's obviously got a really clear link with decisions that named British politicians have taken within recent memory

and so on, and yeah, there's a huge amount of effort that goes on to kind of erase those connections, but that's a really important part of what's going on at the Home Office and going on with border policy more generally, but I think the bigger contradiction is the fact that Britain is a country where migration, both immigration and emigration, people coming and going, is just a huge part of life. It's a kind of staple feature of life for the whole country, and to a certain extent, the state is set up to facilitate that, but you have the department that holds all the power over controlling that, that has to pretend that migration is this tiny little thing that is as limited as possible, and that's for me

where the contradiction lies. People are moving around all of the time, but the Home Office has to sit there every day pretending that the population is completely static and that only these tiny, insignificant categories of people are let through the door, and the vast hordes of the unwashed foreigners are all kept out, and it's just, it's a complete fantasy. What interests me is, of course, we don't want to suggest that migration is this form of ethnic retribution or whatever, we're not doing camp of the saints, but what does interest me is the idea that, in particular, British foreign policy, even things like aid policy, they don't necessarily, like, I'm not so much interested in whether they change the amount of migration or even that

migration existed before that, it tends to make the people, more people who migrate here, more desperate and more exploitable, and I think that lays the groundwork for a lot of the other stuff that the Home Office does, because you can see this in the difference between the way the Home Office treats, say, EU migrants and not. There's a lot more sort of like, there's a lot sharper enforcement there, because they're politically acceptable to kick around. Yeah, although that then, it also depends on who the EU migrants are. Well, yeah, very much, yeah. I think there's a couple of things going on there. I think you've got, the way I would see it is more

that people are moved around by capital, and those forces push people in all sorts of different ways, and Britain plays a role in the kind of global system where it basically is responsible for causing a lot of the disruption, allowing people to move huge amounts of money around, steal money from countries, run kind of businesses that destroy the planet through pollution and all of that, and people moving for all sorts of reasons, some for urgent emergency reasons, and some moving for work in quite comfortable ways, all are a result of that system. Sure, but in terms of the feedback loop for that, we're not getting vans with billboards on them, saying go home for people who move here from Germany.

Well, no. Well, we may be, so this is kind of what I was getting to, that what Britain and all other nation states apply in response to that is a filtering system. That's kind of how, when I've written about borders in the past, I've tried to get people to see that they're actually, you know, they're not kind of the static things, they're ways of putting people into different categories and then filtering them according to the political priorities of whoever's running that system. Every home secretary for the last 25 years, just like doing the sort of knee reflex hammer thing with the phrase Australian points-based immigration system. Right, so that tells you, yeah, and that's kind of the kind of code word for the kind of filtering

that politicians in Britain tend to think the public won. Less strong goes and bogans. But that's got, so this is where I think the things get a bit mixed up because you've got several different things going on there at once. So there's this kind of really rigid sort of economic hierarchy to things. You see that that coming out in the thing, the thing politicians will also say as well as Australian points-based, Australian style points-based system is they always go on about wanting the brightest and best. So it's the idea that the system will facilitate again, going back to this idea of the good migrants and then keeping out the bads and

it's how the so-called bad migrants are defined that you start to see all these other kinds of hierarchies coming into play. So one major one, and I think this is what you were getting at already, is a kind of racialized hierarchy where people who are racialized as non-white get worse treatment at the hands of the system in all sorts of ways. But there's also a kind of economic hierarchy that links into that as well, where you can say for instance that EU migrants get better treatment. Well, there's a huge difference to how a border guard is likely to see a well-dressed Germanic looking businessman and somebody coming from Romania, Bulgaria, somebody who's of Roma origin and so on. And I think actually looking at how all of that is changing now that people from

the EU are being subjected to the same filtering system that people from the rest of the world have been subjected to already for years, shows you exactly how those hierarchies are being applied. So I mean, it's really violent and there are infinite ways that the home office has of making people miserable at the border, I guess is my main point. Let's focus again on the home office itself, right? We talked a little bit about asking the question, how did the home office get like it was? I think we've got this, we have our sort of explanation around say a capital Britain's role in the world, how the home office has forced to have a basically impossible job that it can only do by being as cruel as possible. Let's talk about the actual history of the institution.

It was founded in 1827 as Her Majesty's office for scrutinizing the Irish. Well, actually, technically, it was founded in response to anti-Catholic, anti-Irish rights in the 1780s. But yeah, I mean, how did the home office get like it did? Well, so it, I mean, it's one of the oldest government departments, it's always been the so-called law and order department. Every country's interior ministry, whatever it's called, is going to have a pretty brutal history to it, I think. I think there's definitely a kind of long term aspect to it that the British state has always, I guess, the kind of narrative that Britain likes to tell about itself is it's the, you know, it's the home of liberties and the freeborn Englishman and the

state, you know, unlike those dirty, weird Europeans, the state kind of lets people get on with their business and doesn't interfere in their lives. But actually, you know, there's a whole history of Britain having this extrude. It may not be true, I would suggest. And probably the home office is the thing you would look at to see where it might not be true. I think because of what Britain is and, you know, the way the state was formed, the empire it ran and so on, the way that the domestic working class were treated and so on, the home offices had this, always had this pretty brutal edge to it. You know, it was the, if I think I've got my history right here, it was the home secretary in the 1970s that sent troops into Northern Ireland. You know, it's had this very

heavy kind of security role to it always. So there's always, there's also always been in kind of like Whitehall law that that's meant that the home office has always had this kind of pretty grim vibe to it. You know, it was it was the department that administered the death penalty. There's a story about how when the death penalty was still in action, it would have in the old home office headquarters. There were, there was a wall display that had the pictures of the people who were condemned to death lined up on it and they would kind of move up the list. That's a totally normal thing to have. And not until like a serial killer's trophy room. Yeah. The home office is the only British government department that I think actually would have a collection of years.

Yeah. Well, whereas, I mean, the thing is, it's like, if you're sort of typified as a bit of a sadist, I think the home office or the Ministry of Defence or the jobs you get shuffled into, right? Yeah. Well, whereas nowadays, of course, everything is now so soy that if the home office had that thing, if we still had the death penalty, there would all be like Funko pops of the people condemned to death. Yeah. I mean, I guess, and again, you could, you could probably pick any other rich country in the world and you'd find the equivalent department would have have an element of this too. But I guess, you know, the way that the British ruling class operates is it's also done on this kind of gentlemanly, personal level. And I think it's where those two things overlap

that you get the kind of weirdness of it. So the detail that I found that summed that up was that the home secretary until well into the 20th century was personally responsible for verifying the birth of the Royal Air. So the home secretary had to go to the Queen's bed chamber as she was giving birth or just after and and visually confirm that the baby had Whoa, like official genital inspector. Yeah. Just imagine trying to be born with pretty Patel looking at you just you'd go right back in. The last Royal Air that this happened to was Queen Elizabeth the second. So the last time this was done was in 1924 or 26, whenever it was. So it's got that kind of vibe to it. And then in the sort of turn of the what century you're in

now 21st, so turn of the 21st century. It starts having all these extra expectations put on it, many of which kind of revolve around immigration, although counterterrorism is the other big area which I didn't really got some quotes from you. As a matter of fact, we talk about the early 21st century, which as you'll recall, I'm sure I'm sure I can explain it much better than I can right now. So we're going to cross examine you now. Let me just put to you something you said earlier. See how clever you feel then. We're going to we're going to hear from past Daniel. But yeah, so this is this is sort of in 2003, right? This is because if you recall back to the 90s and early 2000s, there was the Blair of the 97 election campaign that basically the following day gets

replaced by the Blair of the rest of his career, which is as this kind of petty authoritarian. And so you say Daniel in your article in one notorious episode in 2003. And this is also about press collaboration. Downing Street collaborated with the Sun on a special asylum week, a series of articles that began on Monday with a piece that had lined halt the asylum tied now and ended on Friday with a column by then Home Secretary David Blunkett, promising quote unquote draconian measures to clamp down on illegal immigration. He's basically saying to the Sun, I promise you, I am going to be as cruel as possible. I feel like using the word draconian to describe something you're doing is is ill advised. But I feel like draconian is an

inherently pejorative adjective. Like you could do something like if you're a Home Secretary injured or thorough or, you know, and we might think it's draconian, but you shouldn't really like that is very much the quiet part. You know, of course, he was smothered to death with cloaks after this. Yeah. And he was listening to Good Charlotte while he wrote that. So, but what am I sort of reason to reason? I sort of pull that out from your piece, right? Is that is that this it's it shows that sort of a lot of these tools that the Tories are now using to sort of, you know, criminalize and immiserate people. So who are trying who are coming here? Who are just doing what it is natural moving people move? A lot of those tools in 2003 sort

of arose in the new Labor Home Office, right? That's when we made the tools. Yeah, definitely. And that goes back to what I was saying earlier about the idea of filtering. So, you know, you mentioned this kind of contrast between the Tony Blair of the 97 election campaign and the Tony Blair that took office immediately after and I guess the contrast there is between someone who kind of looks open and liberal and progressive and, you know, modern and is about improving everything. And then you get this petty authoritarian, I think actually those two things work in tandem. A friend of mine just so and I think this goes, this is like the not the sort of the logic of neoliberalism really, which is the way the way

a friend of mine wants to put it, which I think was very good. It's like the state stands back and lets the market go for it. And then has then and then when things go wrong, has to step in and be kind of even more sort of authoritarian and clumsy, trying to sweep up the mess that it's allowed to develop. And I think the kind of the development of all of these increasingly authoritarian tools to police immigration is a really good example of that. So new labor ended up in that vicious cycle, not because it was a government that tried to prevent immigration, but it was a government that promised the population we can have loads of immigration that serves the needs of the market and therefore the economy and therefore you,

you know, the British population. But if you don't like aspects of it, then we'll crack down really, really hard on it. With like, we'll give you, you know, slightly more generous benefits, but also we will drive a tank through the houses of benefit sheets. Yeah, which they were doing at the same time. And you say after that as well, you quote Jackie Smith, a subsequent Home Secretary, who says, who said immigration, eventual contestant on a fucking strictly come dancing and Home Secretaries love to go on strictly. Yeah. Well, yeah, because also, she's not the only, what do you call those kind of shows, sort of reality, dance, shit, celebrity shows. You may call them that as well. But wasn't Alan, Alan Johnson was like,

he was the master singer, wasn't he? Yes. What ruled about that? And no one knew who he was. What absolutely whipped about that was that he took the mask off and you can see all of the judges looking absolutely puzzled. And Jonathan Ross had to go, that's Alan Johnson. And then Rita Ora had to go like, right, yeah, I know who that is. Former Home Secretary and more recent, I believe, yeah, strictly contestant, Jackie Smith said to you in an interview, immigration is a good thing for the country, but you can't sell that to the public. So therefore, what you have to do is convince people that you're going to then engage in filtering. Well, she uses more words, but

essentially engage in filtering. And that's why we have to be super tough on deporting people. And I wanted to talk about that phrase. You can't sell that to the public. That's sort of moral cowardice. Yeah. Well, it's the, we talk about, you know, the neoliberal model of sort of essentially interfering to serve the needs of business more or less in the state or in society, whatever you want to call it. And what we have here, right, is we have someone who has said, yeah, we're going to do this, this filtering system. I know we're going to be tough on people. I know we'd love to have more immigration, but because of our model of governance, we have to say that we're not going to.

But at least we're, we new labor are going to have the decency to feel bad about what we're doing. And I think that's just such a perfect sort of summation of a lot of this, right? Is that, you know, you, is that you're going to have evil or you're going to have gleeful evil or regretful. Yeah. Yeah. But if you don't choose the regretful evil, then you're a bad person. Because it's because I think it's because I think, right, well, a big part of this is a, just then, as you say, Daniel, the nature of one of these offices in a sort of rich Western country is always going to do something like this because of the world we live in. And well, not always going to, but because of the politics of the

places we are in, they're going to have a history of doing that. They're going to want to do that. But, you know, additionally, right, like you're, yeah, you have, as you say, you have the anyone who sort of wants to come in and sort of thinks the state is basically fine as it is, just wants to operate it. They're going to do the evil thing. The only valences, are they going to feel bad about it? Yeah, that's definitely part of it. And I think the other, the big pressure that really came out in interviews I did with people is that that's to a huge extent determined by the pressure that people within the system feel from the right-wing press, right-wing media outlets, that that's what they've always got one eye on. That's the thing

that they are worried is going to go for them if they seem to be soft at any moment. And I think, I mean, you know, I sort of feel like I spent a lot of my time as a journalist trying to point out various things that New Labour did wrong and got wrong. But I kind of feel like this piece was the last time I'm going to do that because it's actually really far away in the past now. And the stuff that's happened since is, it's been really important to show the links between that period and what we've ended up with now. But actually, there's so much, it's taken on such a new dynamic now, I think people need to turn their attention to what's happening now. And the way I would explain that is actually one of the most interesting

interviewees, unfortunately, interesting to me, but way too kind of like technical and nerdy to go into the article was Charles Clark, who was Home Secretary for just just a year or so in about 2005. But he's kind of like the arched New Labour technocrat. So he took it beyond just this idea of it being about being scared of the media and, you know, wanting to look tough and so on. But he explained it as like, the New Labour approach to all of this was that, yeah, you've got this kind of neoliberal form of government, but you've also got really sophisticated new technology that's going to help you manage society with much more control than you ever could before. And that it's all about predicting what's going

to happen next and making sure that your systems are resilient, that they can withstand what's going to happen. So if there's a new kind of big displacement of people and you get lots more refugees, your system, you've kind of anticipated that and you're set up to do it. And therefore, what you need a load, you need this huge complex, very technical system that gives you lots of control over people. And at the time that New Labour were establishing this, they got a lot of criticism from from Liberals, like Liberals in the kind of small l liberal, I guess, that this was a threat to civil liberties, not just the immigration and asylum, but everything they were doing around the war on terror at that time and so on. And I suppose the New Labour argument

would have been, yeah, but this is all for good intentions because if you have that degree of control over populations, if the state can see what people are up to, it needs to intervene less because it can kind of anticipate what's happening and act accordingly. Now, okay, I think that's a terrible argument and leads to all sorts of problems of its own. But the crucial difference that we've had since 2010 is that you've had governments that have wanted that degree of control over the populations while also taking an axe to the systems that are supposed to give them that control. So you've got this much more purely brutal kind of lashing out from the states and a much kind of direct, much more direct link between the demands of the right-wing

press and the kind of right-wing fringe and the people who are at the heads of departments. So obviously the hostile environment that Theresa May launched at David Cameron, I think people forget this, the hostile environment was a creation of David Cameron's, not of Theresa May's. She was following orders, so to speak. But there's that which was taking the kind of tools that new labour had built and just turning them into these kind of much blunter and much more brutal things. And then obviously, since 2016, you've had that intensify as these things have got caught up in the kind of polarization around Brexit and then the ultimate result of which is the arrival of one of the most authoritarian home secretaries in living memory.

Which is saying a lot. We have now. Which is exactly, which is saying a lot. Well, I wonder whether that's like the linchpin of this whole, linchpin might not be the right word, but that's like kind of like the centre of this whole thing, right? Which is that, you know, where you have like this degradation of the state that's sort of happening on this kind of like wide-scale holistic level, you've got this like home, you've got like the home office that even though kind of arguably has the most political power of like any sort of department also like can't really do anything in the same way that like most departments can't do anything. So then

all we're sort of left with is the kind of like cruel theatrics, which like, that's not to say that like the theatrics don't have like material consequences or that like people's lives aren't being made miserable as a result of that. But it's more just along those lines of like every, like I wonder whether like politicians across the board have sort of accepted that there is no meaningful way to like control immigration despite like it being kind of the centre of everyone's manifesto. There is no kind of meaningful way to like do this kind of like tech integrated prediction. So the only way that we can like meaningfully match our manifesto promise is to kind of publicly show that we are being as cruel as possible. Again, like to placate like

tabloid media and uh yeah like and also like British Alba. It's to placate bridge. It's everything is to placate that one account British Alba that replies to everything Boris Johnson does of being like, yes, put me in the cockpit of this fighter jet going 500 miles an hour and the only button is racism, but yeah. Well, like well then we'll then we'll then we'll then end up in a situation where it's like the hostile environment isn't even like an intentional policy, right? Like it isn't even kind of like an instrument that is being used to serve a political purpose. It's literally just the cry laugh emoji, right? It is literally there just to make people miserable because that is the only kind of meaningful thing it can do. Like and largely that is just to like

kind of troll people. Well, I had a discussion with Nate about this recently for a Britonology where we were talking about how the British Conservative Party are almost a bit unique amongst Western right-wing parties in that they're so ideologically committed to austerity conceptually that it doesn't enable them to do the things that most right-wing governments do like beef up the police and the army. So like the Conservatives would like love to send in the troops, but also they're fired them all. It's like a very like they really apply it. They're like, no, no cops. Cops are socialists. That's the government spending money. We've got to get rid of them. Well, no, they've also got that thing where it's like they will increase the funding,

but they're so addicted to like private partnership. So it's like, yeah, we'll kind of like beef up the service, but it has to go through our mate down the pub who also runs this consultancy out of his garage. I think like the way to see it and I think sort of one of the things that you sort of drive at very well in your piece is that there's this sense that so much of the functionality of its ability to actually engage in the doing of stuff has kind of eroded and almost fossilized and been replaced by this fist basically. Now we're at laboratory. Right. And that's all that's kind of left is everything else has just sort of either rotted away or is just gone. And now all that's left in the heart of this is what should be a sort of

functional arm of government. Yeah, it's just a fist. Yeah, I think linking it to austerity is quite useful as well, because in a way the Home Office is kind of a forerunner in that respect in that even though it's been asked to play this really important role politically and carry out what are very, very complicated tasks. If you just take asylum, the asylum system, for instance, assessing whether somebody has got an asylum claim that meets the criteria under the sort of internationally recognized definitions of a refugee is really difficult. It comes down to a human relationship between two people, the interviewer and the asylum seeker. And it's about the narrative of someone's life as well as kind of trying to work out if that

person is telling the truth or not and so on. So for that to work, leaving aside the question of whether we want the asylum system to be set up in that way at all or not, but even for it to work on its own terms requires a huge amount of investment in terms of resources and people. And the Home Office has always been run on a complete shoestring in that respect. So the entire bit of the immigration section of the Home Office, I think has a budget of about three billion a year, if I remember correctly. And in government spending terms, that is tiny considering the amount of work it's asked to do. And I think you do it absolutely, you get that dynamic where all that's left is the fifth. And all it's capable of doing is theatrics. And

actually, that's how an immigration lawyer described what goes on to me, described it as immigration theater. And that links back to what you were saying right at the beginning of our chat about how, you know, if you want to kind of understand the absurdity, look at how the Home Office behaves in court, you know, it loses loads of the cases it brings to court, you know, it will persistently appeal against people's applications or if they appeal and it loses, it will then appeal against the decision and so on, even when it knows it's onto a loser. And that is all about being seen to say no. Well, it's because if you don't say, if one person, if you don't fight one case,

and you know, terfina plantation spoils at the Daily Mail, sort of happens upon the record of that case, then there's their cover story for the day. You have to be the sort of inverse man from Del Monte. Yeah. And I think one of the, if we want to sort of link this, I think, as well back to one more thing, right? You want to talk about the relationship between, I think the path the Home Office has taken is a great example of the way, the relationship between the Labour Party and the Conservative Party in as much as what the Conservative Party does, and this is what they're doing now, is they widen the Overton window with a hammer, because they're not careful managers of society, and then the Labour Party comes in and refinishes it and puts a nice window sill on

this widened Overton window for a couple of years, until, of course, terfina plantation spoils and her bosses, sort of, you know, just got a lot to answer for. The manufacturer of the, the manufacturer of the sort of Tory victory, again, they, and what they're doing now is they are taking another hammer to the Overton window, and I think rather than worry about, and you think, as you say, you should understand the roots of this in new Labour, but if you want to think, keep thinking about the Labour Party, think about how Starmer's Labour could potentially either unmake that Overton window or just do what Labour always does, and then just refinish the window sill and make that wide, far-right Overton window much more appealing to look at and actually make it work a

little bit more effectively for a wicked, terrible purpose. You know, I sort of, in terms of that relationship, that's sort of how I tend to see it, but I also notice we are slightly coming up to time. So, Daniel, I want to give you the final word. Oh, wow, big responsibility. Okay, I'll try make this a word rather than a long discourse, but just picking up on what you were saying, yeah, I think that shows you the kind of decision that anyone who wants to oppose how this works has to make, you know, if a party, you know, if the Labour Party wants to get elected to government, does it do it by promising to just manage this system more competently than the Tories, which is obviously what they're doing right now? Or does it actually have a theory about how the

system can be changed and made to work in a different way? I would say it's really important to look beyond those kind of the sort of the choices that are there at the level of party politics. The people that went into the new Labour government after 1997, you know, okay, some of them were horrible authoritarians from the outset, but you had people in charge of the immigration system who had been things like asylum rights campaigners and, you know, and yet they ended up doing the thing that they probably would have abhorred if you'd told them a decade earlier. And I think it tells you that to me, it says once you get to that level of politics, your options are quite limited. So for me, it's all about well, what can people do to resist the system as it's operating

now? The reason why there's this moral panic of over lefty activist lawyers, for instance, is because people do find effective ways to defend rights within the system as it is. And the progress comes from people that have sought to disrupt it in different ways. So that's like, you know, communities organizing solidarity with one another, journalistic exposing stuff that people basically want to ignore, even though they know it's going on like with the Windrush scandal, lawyers finding ways to open cracks in the system and let people through because, you know, regardless of whether that leads to, you know, the Labour Party winning an election in 10 years time, those are the lives of people here now that that kind of materially changes.

And I think actually, for me, at least, a successful left-wing challenge to how the system works now has to be grounded in that, first of all, it's not just about picking the right line to say at the level of discourse, it's about the demands emerging from that kind of that kind of fight. And yeah, I think that's a wonderful way to end it. Thank you very much for coming and hanging out with us and talking to us about this. It's been a very interesting conversation. I was pleased to have it. Me too. You're welcome. And yeah, and to all you out there in Radio Land, thank you very much for listening. We'll see you on the bonus episode in a couple of days, which will be, of course, great fun, I am sure. Yeah. Bye, everyone. Bye.