With child tax credit stance, Manchin runs afoul of former faith allies
The senator’s support for work requirements puts him at odds with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Association of Evangelicals, among other faith groups.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., speaks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Sept. 30, 2021. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

January 5, 2022
By Jack Jenkins

WASHINGTON (RNS) — As Democrats struggle to revive talks over the stalled Build Back Better bill, Sen. Joe Manchin is facing pushback from a spectrum of religious groups frustrated by his position on the child tax credit — including conservative-leaning faith organizations whose concerns he has championed in the past.

Debate over the Build Back Better Act, a sweeping social programs proposal and a core part of President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda, ground to a halt in December when Manchin declared he wouldn’t vote for the bill.

According to The Washington Post, negotiations broke down after the West Virginia Democrat floated an alternative proposal to White House officials, which maintained elements of the original legislation but omitted an expansion of the child tax credit, a popular provision that provides financial assistance to parents with children.

This week, Manchin told reporters he supports a child tax credit, which advocates say helps prevent child poverty — but only if it includes a work requirement for parents wishing to receive the benefit.

“I think there should be a work requirement,” Manchin told Business Insider. “I’ve been very, very direct on that.”

RELATED: Faith leaders arrested while protesting in support of Build Back Better bill

The plan would bar some of the poorest families from accessing the benefit, which was expanded last year under Biden’s stimulus law to allow most families to receive monthly payments of up to $300 per child. But the expansion expired last month, and if Manchin’s proposal for a work requirement — which he has suggested for months — were to become the new norm, families that do not pay federal income taxes due to lack of income would not receive the checks.

Manchin, a Catholic Democrat, is now at odds with religious groups such as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, a group whose positions he has promoted in the past: When the USCCB, National Association of Evangelicals, Orthodox Union and other faith groups raised concerns about a provision of the Build Back Better bill requiring faith-run prekindergarten and child care programs to comply with federal nondiscrimination statutes, the West Virginia senator reportedly advocated for a change.

But when asked about the child tax credit, USCCB spokesperson Chieko Noguchi pointed to a Sept. 7 letter from bishops voicing support for the benefit expansion. The authors argued “it is especially important that the credit remain fully refundable to ensure the most economically vulnerable children benefit from this family support.”

Noguchi said the USCCB is “concerned that work requirements would undermine this goal and put the credit out of reach for those neediest children and their families.”

Manchin’s proposal has also pitted him against the National Association of Evangelicals. While the group has not taken a position on the Build Back Better Act as a whole, Galen Carey, the group’s vice president for government relations, has appeared at faith-themed events to express support for the bill’s child tax credit provision.

Asked this week about tying work requirements to the child tax credit, Carey was quick to express disapproval.

“We support making the child tax credit fully available to the families who need the help the most,” he said in a statement. “Work is critically important to human dignity but having a particular level of earned family income should not be a prerequisite to accessing support for their children. Full CTC refundability is what makes it such a powerful anti-poverty tool.”

In a previous statement sent to Religion News Service in December, Carey noted the benefit has enjoyed bipartisan support in the past and “has been expanded by both Republicans and Democrats.”

“Congress should act urgently to extend the Child Tax Credit, whether as part of a larger package or as a separate bill,” the statement read.

RELATED: As Biden’s agenda navigates Congress, faith groups lobby Manchin

Representatives for Manchin did not immediately respond to questions about the religious pushback, but faith groups have condemned Manchin’s position for months. Chief among them: the Poor People’s Campaign, a faith-led activist group that often advocates for liberal-leaning legislation. Poor People’s Campaign leaders staged large protests decrying Manchin throughout 2021 for several reasons, including opposition to his stance on the child tax credit.

While discussing Manchin’s suggestion of work requirements during a September news conference, the Rev. Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, described the idea as a “regression back to the tired debate of deserving and undeserving poor.”

She noted some Republicans have justified work requirements in other contexts by invoking a New Testament Scripture passage, 2 Thessalonians 3:10, which reads: “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.” She insisted the passage, when taken in context, “does not blame the poor for moral failures that lead to poverty, nor does it suggest that work requirements should be attached to social programs.”

She added: “There is a moral critique, there is a constitutional critique, of the wealthy benefiting off the work of others, and other ways that the rich punish and oppress the poor.”

Can Biden's child tax credit be revived?


Mike Bebernes
·Senior Editor
Wed, January 5, 2022

Biden, Manchin set to resume talks over Build Back Better Act

What’s happening

The expanded child tax credit, a groundbreaking social program that gave millions of American families monthly checks from the federal government, expired at the end of the year.

The U.S. has had a child tax credit since the 1990s, but when Democrats passed their $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package in March, they made three major changes that transformed it from a typical end-of-year tax write-off to the closest thing the country has ever had to a child allowance. The bill increased the size of the credit from $2,000 to up to $3,600, issued checks monthly and changed eligibility rules so low-income parents who had been left out under the previous system could receive the full benefit.

The first checks, for either $250 or $300 depending on the age of the child, went out to about 35 million families in July. Democrats were hoping to include a long-term extension in President Biden’s Build Back Better legislation, but the program expired when they weren’t able to reach an agreement on the sweeping social spending plan before the end of the year. Even though it lasted for only a few months, studies suggest that the monthly checks helped keep struggling families afloat and significantly reduced child poverty.

Disagreement over the child tax credit is reportedly one of the thorniest issues that have prevented a deal from being reached. Conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, whose vote is needed to pass any version of Biden’s agenda, appears to be particularly opposed to the credit — even reportedly saying that parents would spend the money they received on drugs. In late December, Manchin reportedly presented Biden with a $1.8 trillion package that he’d be willing to support. The expanded child tax credit was not part of that plan.
Why there’s debate

Manchin’s apparent opposition to the expanded child tax credit is considered by many as a signal that the program is gone for good. But there’s some optimism that he could be convinced to include it in a final version of Build Back Better, if a deal is reached at all.

Some political analysts say it’s possible that pressure from his Democratic colleagues and his constituents could push Manchin to drop his objections. Others believe he could be convinced to accept a trimmed-down version of the credit that potentially includes smaller checks, targets support only to the neediest families or imposes other restrictions like a work requirement.

There is also hope for alternative paths to support parents outside of the Build Back Better framework, some say. Specific attention has been paid to a proposal from Republican Sen. Mitt Romney that would create a more direct child allowance system to provide monthly benefits to families through the Social Security Administration rather than as a tax credit. In theory, Romney could give Democrats the 50th vote needed to pass a plan without Manchin’s support. Enthusiasm for the short-lived federal program could also prompt some states and cities to create their own versions, others say.
What’s next

Monthly checks have stopped, but parents can still expect one boost from the expanded child tax credit. The program ran for only half the year, meaning families can claim the other half — up to $1,800 per child — when they file their taxes.
Perspectives

A smaller, more targeted version of the credit might be acceptable to Manchin

“The child tax credit itself should be more targeted and last longer. … The child tax credit increases could also be focused on younger children by retaining the full increase for children under 3 but scaling it back for older children. Finally, the credit could be phased out more rapidly as incomes rise, focusing help on those who need it most.” — Jason Furman, Wall Street Journal

Manchin may be more susceptible to pressure on the child tax credit than other policies

“Normally, Manchin gets pressure on social issues from the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party. This criticism from the wider party is fuel for his positioning and policy goals within the state. On such issues, the more criticism he receives from the left, the better. … The public pressure on child tax credits is not the norm and does not offer the same pivot for Manchin. West Virginians value programs like the child tax credit.” — Samuel Workman, Conversation

It may be impossible to sell Manchin on supporting the child tax credit

“Manchin’s various rationales just don’t add up. Unless his bottom line is that he just doesn’t want to extend the policy no matter what — or even worse wants to kill all of BBB — and is just looking for an excuse to do so.” — Greg Sargent, Washington Post

Lack of full-throated public support limits how much pressure Manchin will feel

“When the policy first passed in March, many experts hailed its potential to cut child poverty and hunger, and many Democrats hoped regular cash in families’ pockets would prove wildly popular. But the public’s appraisal has been less glowing. … As the party continues to debate whether and how to resurrect the expanded credit, polls generally suggest that Americans have reservations about making it a more lasting fixture of the social safety net.” — Ian Prasad Philbrick, New York Times

Romney could prove to be the savior of Biden’s family-benefit agenda

“With Manchin clearly out on child tax credit, it’s time to separate the plan from Build Back Better and work to get it passed with bipartisan support. Romney, to his credit, already has a plan which closely mirrors that of the Democrat party. This option is a clear win-win-win.” — Toph Cottle, Salt Lake Tribune

Replacing the credit with Romney’s plan would be a win for American families

“To be sure, the Romney plan is not perfect. … But even with these flaws, it’s still quite a good benefit that is better than the status quo and, in my view, even better than the CTC the Democrats were trying to pass in the BBB legislation. Democrats should work with Romney to pass this plan.” — Matt Breunig, People’s Policy Project

States could create their own programs

“Frustrated on a national level, some lawmakers are shifting their focus to state-level child tax credits to offer families a safety net.” — Ursula Perano, Daily Beast

The country will be better off if the expanded credit is gone for good

“Why aren’t they making those bigger monthly checks permanent, as President Joe Biden and other key Democrats have said they intend? It’s simple: It would come at a staggering cost.” — Matt Weidinger, Washington Examiner

Is there a topic you’d like to see covered in “The 360”? Send your suggestions to the360@yahoonews.com.

Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Getty Images

Myanmar coup-fuelled poverty pushes thousands to Thailand

PUBLISHED : 6 JAN 2022 
WRITER: AFP

In this file handout photo from the Royal Thai Army released on Oct 25, 2021, a Thai military personnel in protective gear checks the temperature of Myanmar migrants apprehended by Thai military personnel in Kanchanaburi province. (AFP)

Trekking through dense jungle and mountainous terrain at night to avoid arrest, one couple from Myanmar endured a gruelling journey to Thailand -- grasping for an economic lifeline as jobs dry up in their coup-hit home.

Myo Chit and his wife are among thousands of migrants who have made the crossing in recent months, spurred by the twin crises of a pandemic-hit economy and turmoil triggered by the junta's ousting of Aung San Suu Kyi's civilian government.

Their two-day journey from Myanmar's coastal Tanintharyi Region took them through corn farms, rubber plantations and dense jungle before they reached the porous border, where they crossed into Kanchanaburi province with the help of a smuggler.

There they risked arrest and immediate processing for deportation by police.

The couple then travelled to Samut Sakhon province near Bangkok, where Myanmar migrants have historically found work.

But for undocumented migrants in the country, life under the radar is grim.

Many spend their nights in overcrowded housing, or in the homes of friends and relatives, and their days evading authorities.

"But we could not stay (in our town)... we had to think about the future of our children," 45-year-old Myo Chit told AFP, using a pseudonym for fear of being tracked down by authorities.

He eventually secured the job he was desperate for at a clothing dye factory, earning 300 baht a day.

With a six-year-old child and an infant left in his in-laws' care in Myanmar, Myo Chit said leaving was difficult but had to be done.

"We could not stay there because of high prices -- we had to leave our village," he said. "We came here just to earn money."

In this file handout photo from the Royal Thai Army released on Nov 1, 2021, Myanmar migrants sit on the ground after being apprehended by military personnel in Kanchanaburi province. (AFP)

- 'It is hard' -

Myanmar workers have long sought jobs in Thailand. Pre-pandemic, an estimated two million were living and working in the kingdom.

With borders closed since March 2020, migrants have no choice but to make the journey illegally.

There is no official data on the size of the influx, but experts say one indicator is the number of migrants who have been caught by authorities.

In the months after Myanmar's Feb 1 coup, the number of arrests tripled, according to government figures.

It peaked in November with more than 6,000 migrants intercepted -- more than a 10-fold increase from the 560 people arrested in January 2020.

According to Geraldine Ansart, the International Organization for Migration's Thailand mission chief, for each person arrested, "it is realistic to assume that... at least one other Myanmar national could cross the border without being apprehended".

Migrant rights activist Roisai Wongsuban said the spike in arrivals is due to Myanmar's post-coup economic crisis, which has seen inflation soar and work opportunities evaporate.

With food prices doubling and fuel costs spiking as the value of the kyat, Myanmar's currency, plummeted against the US dollar, many people became destitute, she said.

"It is hard for ordinary people."

Seasonal workers, who for years had travelled in and out of Thailand, were left in the lurch after Covid-spurred border closures.

"The border has been closed for so long that there is no legal pathways for workers who want to come back to Thailand," Ms Roisai added.

Army spokesman Gen Santipong Thammapiya said it was mainly the country's reopening to tourists in November that was drawing Myanmar workers back -- many of whom staff the kingdom's vital industries, including the service and restaurant sector.

"Workers... wanted to come back," he told AFP. "They also trust the Thai healthcare system, which can provide treatment for Covid."

Myanmar refugees, who fled a flare-up in fighting between the Myanmar army and insurgent groups and settled temporarily on the Moei River Bank, receive aid from Thailand on the Thai-Myanmar border, in Mae Sot, Tak province on Tuesday. 

(Reuters photo)

- Zero tolerance -

Demand for Myanmar workers is high in Thailand, where -- given their status -- they have no choice but to accept lower wages.

According to the labour ministry, there is a shortage of up to 200,000 workers.

But according to Gen Santipong, there is no tolerance in Bangkok for illegal migration, and those arrested making the attempt are sent "for legal processing followed by... repatriation", he said.

Despite the obstacles, two people smugglers operating near Kanchanaburi province's Three Pagodas Pass border crossing told AFP business has been good.

Prices to make the crossing range from 13,000 to 25,000 baht, and desperation drives thousands to pay.

"Some are arrested, but there are even more people who are not," one smuggler told AFP on condition of anonymity.

WW3.0

Can Europe avert a war between US and China?


PUBLISHED : 6 JAN 2022 
NEWSPAPER SECTION: OPED
WRITER: ROBERT WILLIAMS & MORITZ RUDOLF

An attendant walks past EU and China flags ahead of the EU-China High-level Economic Dialogue at Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing in 2018. (Photo: Reuters)

European countries are currently divided over whether to join US President Joe Biden's diplomatic boycott of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Beijing. The episode underscores yet again that when it comes to dealing with China, Europe and the United States truly are an ocean apart.

Beyond sharing fundamental political values, the US and Europe often employ similar rhetoric about the challenge China poses to the international order. Nonetheless, most European governments cannot reconcile their interests with the vision of a US-led coalition of democracies standing up to the world's autocracies, and European officials baulk at pursuing a China policy focused on containment, under the guise of competition.

While the European Union wants to deepen transatlantic cooperation, there is no consensus on how to do so without alienating China or undermining the very international system it aims to defend. Nor are European governments convinced of America's reliability as a partner. Mr Biden might value the transatlantic relationship, but his predecessor, Donald Trump, did not. Who is to say what the next US president -- possibly Mr Trump himself -- will stand for? This doubt is a key motivation behind the EU's effort to operationalise its vision of "strategic autonomy".

To be sure, there is scope for transatlantic collaboration on China. In fact, efforts to advance such cooperation are already in motion, in the form of initiatives like the US-EU Dialogue on China and the US-EU Trade and Technology Council. Nevertheless, joint action to counter China's anti-competitive commercial and trade practices, export and investment restrictions in response to China's human-rights abuses, and a push for high standards for overseas infrastructure projects should be welcomed.

But the current US-EU agenda on China might be overly ambitious. Clearer prioritisation is needed to maximise the benefits of coordination. Furthermore, differing legal systems and threat perceptions in the US and Europe will make progress in key areas -- such as carbon taxes, antitrust policy, or responses to Chinese disinformation campaigns -- painfully slow.

The prospects for meaningful military and security cooperation vis-à-vis China are especially limited. While European countries have made some symbolic moves -- for example, the German warship Bayern recently demonstrated the right to free passage in the South China Sea -- they are wary of going much further.

This is the case even for France, the only European country with a significant military presence in the Indo-Pacific. As French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian recently explained, "We do not underestimate the depth of competition with China, which can be ferocious, and the need for a constant evaluation of risks, but we try to avoid the militarisation of our strategy to allow us to include -- respectful of their sovereignty -- all interested countries."

This unwillingness to take a hard stance on China is set to persist. While Germany's new government does appear likely to adopt a somewhat firmer tone, Chancellor Olaf Scholz has taken a cautious line, making clear that all actions should be "carefully weighed" and emphasising the need to seek a cooperative approach.

So, the US should not expect Germany to start viewing relations with China through a primarily ideological lens any time soon. The communication failures surrounding the Aukus defence agreement between Australia, the UK and the US -- a deal that blindsided France, which lost a major defence contract -- further underscore the limits of US-Europe military cooperation in the Indo-Pacific.

But transatlantic cooperation is hardly the only way Europe can influence the US-China relationship -- and mitigate the risks that its rapid deterioration implies. Strategists are currently scrambling to draw lessons from history and devise an approach that enables the two sides to compete without catastrophe, particularly armed conflict. Europe can help here.

The EU should consider launching a diplomatic initiative reminiscent of the Helsinki Process, credited with reducing tensions between the Soviet and Western blocs in the 1970s. Through such a process, Europe could broker agreements to promote de-escalation, risk reduction, and crisis management, thereby reducing the likelihood of armed conflict.

Europe's limited capacity to project military power in the Indo-Pacific could be an asset in this context, as it bolsters European actors' credibility as honest brokers and trusted intermediaries. Compared to more direct stakeholders, the EU might be better positioned to mediate thorny issues such as Taiwan and the South China Sea. It might even be able to promote constructive diplomacy in the domains of cyber and outer space. In these contexts, American and Chinese forces regularly operate in proximity, and a miscalculation could lead to war.

No one should underestimate the difficulty of establishing rules of the road that are robust enough to avert conflict. But Europe has a comparative advantage in this area -- one that it has demonstrated repeatedly in the past. For example, the European Commission and European countries played a central role in delivering multilateral export-control regimes, such as the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the Wassenaar Arrangement. Europe has also played a critical role in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear programme.

An EU-led de-escalation initiative in the Indo-Pacific is far from a sure thing, especially given the recent increase in tensions between the EU and China. But it would align with the EU's professed goal of pursuing an inclusive approach to the region that strengthens the rules-based international order. More important, it offers perhaps the best chance of averting war between great powers. Is that not why the EU was created? ©2021 Project Syndicate

Robert Williams, a senior research scholar and lecturer at Yale Law School, is Executive Director of Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center. Moritz Rudolf is a post-doctoral fellow at Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center.

Former New Mexico spaceport CFO alleges fraud, retaliation

FILE - In this Oct. 17, 2011, file photo, guests stand outside the new Spaceport America hangar in Upham, N.M. The former chief financial officer for the New Mexico Spaceport Authority has filed a whistleblower lawsuit, alleging that he was forced to resign after raising concerns about financial malfeasance. (AP Photo/Matt York, File) | Photo: AP


By SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN
Updated: January 05, 2022 

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) - The former chief financial officer for the New Mexico Spaceport Authority filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that he was forced to resign after raising concerns about financial malfeasance that he said cost taxpayers millions of dollars.

Among numerous allegations, Zach DeGregorio said in the lawsuit filed Dec. 28 that top officials committed securities fraud by refinancing spaceport gross receipts tax bonds under false pretenses.

He also said secret meetings held between state officials and Spaceport America's most notable tenant - Virgin Galactic - may have resulted in violations of the state's anti-donation law, which restricts government donations to personal and private-sector enterprises as a precaution against graft and corruption.

The civil complaint filed in state district court lists numerous officials, including Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, Economic Development Secretary Alicia Keyes, officials with the New Mexico Finance Authority and members of the Spaceport Authority board.


Nora Meyers Sackett, the governor's spokeswoman, said her office will not comment on pending litigation. Other officials did not immediately respond Wednesday to messages seeking comment about the allegations.

DeGregorio, a certified public accountant who had worked for the spaceport authority for more than four years, posted a video statement about his lawsuit on social media. He said he wanted to set the record straight.

"I believe one person can make a difference in this world and I believe it's important to stand up for what is right," he said.

The lawsuit also details alleged procurement violations and retaliation that DeGregorio faced after first reporting his concerns to officials in 2020. DeGregorio asked for a jury trial for the lawsuit, which seeks back pay, lost future earnings and other financial damages, including punitive damages.

DeGregorio's initial complaints triggered a 2020 investigation into allegations of financial mismanagement, ethical violations and abuse of power by former spaceport director Dan Hicks, who was fired in 2021. Hicks has never commented publicly about the claims.

New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas' office said Wednesday that prosecutors have reviewed the financial oversight concerns raised during Hicks' tenure and directed the Spaceport Authority to strengthen its governance and oversight structures to ensure the appropriate use of taxpayer dollars.

"However, no conclusion has been reached on any related criminal matter at this time and we are still evaluating the new allegations contained in the complaint and will respond accordingly," the office said in an emailed statement to The Associated Press.

DeGregorio also listed Balderas and State Auditor Brian Colón as officials who were part of what he described as a cover-up involving problems at the spaceport. Colón noted that only the state of New Mexico was named as a party in the civil complaint.

DeGregorio said the 2020 investigative report prepared for the state auditor's office was flawed.

That report alleged DeGregorio assisted Hicks in circumventing procurement policies and evading internal controls. However, DeGregorio in his complaint stated that Hicks had repeatedly tried to get him to skirt the rules and that other spaceport employees were too scared to speak up.

DeGregorio alleged that the procurement violations continued after he resigned.

DeGregorio in the lawsuit accused Keyes - who also was appointed by Lujan Grisham as chair of the spaceport authority board - of ordering him to alter a report that projected the spaceport's economic impact at almost $1 billion between 2016 and 2025. He said he refused and reported the matter to the governor's office.


Sierra and Doña Ana counties both enacted local taxes to help repay bonds that funded construction of Spaceport America, a desert outpost just north of Las Cruces that is designed to support a range of aerospace businesses - from commercial tourism ventures like those planned by Virgin Galactic to vertical rocket launches.

DeGregorio accused state officials of using the Spaceport Authority to refinance the gross receipts tax bonds with the New Mexico Finance Authority under false pretenses.

He said rather than refinancing in the public market, the bonds were refinanced at higher interest rates and under poor loan terms that included a requirement for a large reserve fund.

DeGregorio alleges that Keyes was attempting to perform a sole source refinance directly with the New Mexico Finance Authority rather than putting the refinancing out to bid. If the bonds would have been refinanced in the public markets, he claimed that the Finance Authority would be required to give back millions of dollars in reserve funds and would not receive any future spaceport tax revenues.

According to the lawsuit, the Finance Authority collected the tax revenue from the two counties and repackaged it into low interest loans to provide to other projects in other locations around New Mexico.

On Understanding Society

Fred Friendly interviews Walter Lippmann, America’s founding media critic

Context clues: In 1922, Walter Lippmann, known as the father of American journalism, wrote Public Opinion, on the subject of government, mass communication, and societal perceptions. Late in his life, during the Vietnam War, the book—and in particular Lippmann’s idea of “the manufacture of consent”—drew renewed interest. The following interview, with Fred Friendly, appeared in the Fall 1969 edition.

By Walter Lippmann

FALL 1969

“For when there was panic in the air, with one crisis tripping over the heels of another, actual dangers mixed with imaginary scares, there is no chance at all for the constructive use of reasons, and any order soon seems preferable to any disorder.”

So wrote Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion in 1922.

Some weeks before his eightieth birthday, at the invitation of Prof. Fred W. Friendly of the Columbia Journalism faculty, Mr. Lippmann held a seminar with a small group of graduate students to discuss the contemporary applicability of this and other observations from his long and distinguished career. The text below is excerpted from the three-hour dialogue which resulted.

 

Public opinion has been the third force that really changed American policy on the Vietnam war. How did that come about?

Well, the war was very distant, nobody was interested in it, and the Johnson method of handling the war was to conceal it from the American people. In the first year of the fighting, this was the Johnson escalation, because before that it was not really a war in the sense that it is now. It was concealed by the fact that the Army which was sent to Vietnam to do the fighting was really a professional army. It was not a drafted army. What Johnson did was to cannibalize the American forces all over the world, and build up probably the best army the United States has had in the world. But that army could last only about a year, until its term expired. During the next year or two Johnson more and more couldn’t hide the fact that we were drafting men to fight that war.

Now, drafting men to fight a war 10,000 miles away is something that no sensible great power has ever attempted. The British, in all their period of imperial rule in the nineteenth century, never conscripted Englishmen to fight in Asia. They always relied on volunteers, professional soldiers, and on mercenaries. They hired the Indians, the Gurkhas; regiments of Iranians and other people from the Middle East, and so on; but there were no Englishmen conscripted to fight around the world. Johnson, who knows no history, didn’t realize what a thing he was doing when he began to conscript an army to fight a war that nobody believed in particularly anyway—nobody had ever had it explained to them, nobody could explain the reason for it—10,000 miles away. It was that that began to arouse the American people to realize what this was. And Johnson kept getting one general after another to come forward and say we were winning it when we were not winning it. Finally the Tet Offensive came, and he tried to get generals to say we would only take 35,000 men. But finally it was leaked out from Washington that Westmoreland wanted 206,000 men. And that figure broke Johnson’s back. That was when public opinion revolted. That’s why Johnson had to retire.

One of the reasons for all the turmoil in the country the last few years has been the feeling of a lot of young people that our governmental institutions are not responsive to the needs and feelings of the people. But apparently you do believe that at least in an informal way our government is responsive to public opinion?

Well, it’s responsive to the kind of thing that I was talking about, which is being for the war or against it. The fact that the country came to be against the war is very important. Whether you can get a public opinion sharpened and attuned and made accurate to more specific reforms, I’m not sure. And I think that one of the difficulties—the difficulty with television, the difficulty with this turmoil—is that you cannot refine public opinion and educate it to very detailed and complicated things. I don’t expect that any large audience, for instance, could ever really understand the problem of decentralizing the schools in New York City. I think it’s just too complicated and difficult. It just won’t catch in the net. So I don’t want to sound too optimistic about public opinion.

How many problems do you think this country can digest at one time without breaking at the seams? We have Vietnam, the cities, the race problem. Are these likely to create a permanent cleavage?

Well, that’s a problem I’ve been worried about all my life, but I have begun to realize, since I wrote Public Opinion and also while I was writing it, that the capacity of the general public—on which we’re dependent for votes—to take on many problems is very limited. I wrote a book called The Phantom Public [1925], arguing that really what public opinion in the end could do was to say yes or no. It couldn’t do anything very much more complicated than that. It couldn’t say three-quarters or five-sixths but not two-sevenths—it isn’t able to do that. That’s what a scientist has to do. That’s what an administrator has to do, what a public servant has to do. But public opinion as a mass can’t do that. And it’s one of the great unsolved problems of democracy: how are you going to make popular government—because it’s always going to be popular, in the sense of involving a great many people—how are you going to make that work in the face of the problems which have become infinitely complicated even in the last twenty years?

In that regard, how do you see the role of the mass media, if in fact public opinion is not responsive to very sophisticated and very subtle problems? Is the role of the media to oversimplify them in the hopes of mobilizing some force?

Well, undoubtedly the mass media oversimplify. The American people are very simplistic, they want to be told that things are absolute, that they’re black or white. They don’t want to be bothered very long.

So what should the mass media do?

That is the question, I admit, but first of all, I don’t know enough about the mass media. I know something about journalism, but I know very little about broadcasting. I listen to broadcast journalism, but for the news at night; I don’t get the news from it. I feel utterly dissatisfied almost always. Of course, I’m very interested to see a picture of something happening. That’s very interesting—a splashdown, that’s wonderful. But as for the problems which are very difficult, urban problems and all, you can’t find out about them. You can get a smell of them. You know a little bit about what they’re like, and then you can read about them, or somebody can lecture to you about them. But broadcast journalism has not only a terribly simplifying effect, but a distorting effect, I think, because it makes everything more dramatic than it should be, more interesting, more amusing. And the world of life isn’t that. It’s prosaic.

The current controversy over advertising of cigarettes seems to raise a central question about the relationship between public opinion and social policy. If the scientists and doctors who have no economic involvement in the industry are correct, and they seem to be, then there should be some public outcry about this; it’s not just a problem of public opinion’s not getting to the legislators.

But there’s a good deal of feeling. You see, this pressure has worked. Public opinion doesn’t always work through big mass meetings or demonstrations.

How much do you think public opinion has become synonymous with public relations?

Well, these professionals at public relations are too much for me. There is an awful manipulation of public opinion going on all the time, no doubt about it. It’s not the whole thing, though. Public relations was unable to do anything about the Vietnam war. They tried to. Johnson tried all the techniques he could to hide that war, and then to make it acceptable. And it didn’t work.

How is public opinion best measured? Is the Gallup Poll, for instance, an effective measure of public opinion?

The Gallup Poll is pretty good, if it’s very broadly taken. But 96.3 percent, that’s foolishness. The taxicab poll that most people take when they ride in a taxi and find out what the driver thinks—that has some validity. My wife comes home and tells me about the hairdressers and what they think. Very reactionary, I assure you. They’re afraid to go out at night.

If you’re a public man—say, a President or a candidate or a good journalist—you suddenly know what the public feeling is. Why did Johnson retire, do you think? He knew that he was beaten. And where did he get that? He got it from polls, a little bit, but mostly he just knew, as a public man very well trained in public affairs—he assumed it. I don’t think you can measure everything.

Public opinion isn’t instantaneous. You can’t take flashlights of public opinion and get it right every time. But a man like Johnson, who is made to hear an awful lot, and the representatives in Congress who are representative in the sense that they’re like the others—you talk to them and you know what people in his district are thinking or feeling, and what they’re prejudiced against or for.

You once wrote that the hardest thing to report is chaos, even evolving chaos. That was in 1922. Now, 1968 was a very chaotic year; how do you think journalism performed then?

Well, if I remember what I said in 1922, the world actually—and I think I used the phrase of William James—is a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” and the mind’s eye has to form a picture out of really a very chaotic thing. And that’s done by the creation of stereotypes, which are ways of looking at things; and then after a while when you have these, that’s all you see—what the stereotype says to you. That’s all that comes through.

Now, I think that today the good reporters, both electronic and newspaper, are much more sophisticated and educated men than reporters were in 1922 when I was writing. They’re much more aware of the dangers of superficiality and so on. And they strike me as extremely intelligent. I think on the whole 1968 left us rather confused. Everybody was confused, including the newspapermen, because they were dealing with a situation for which they had no preparation.

Does it seem to you that political writers of the country are swinging to the right? If so, how far to the right do you think they will go?

Well, there’s no doubt that—whether that’s age or personal ambition or what—men do that. It’s a rule any journalist would know: it’s always safer to be conservative than not. You’re much less on the defensive. You have much less to explain yourself for. The Left has recently done some very vicious things, I think. But on the whole, in the lifetime of most men who are now fifty or more, the Right is the one that’s done the vicious things. Fascism was very vicious. I don’t think anybody can predict how far it will go, because it’s action and reaction, how the Left acts and how the Right acts.

“Broadcast journalism has not only a terribly simplifying effect, but a distorting effect.”

How would you compare the social rebelliousness of the generation coming of age now with the social rebelliousness of the one that came of age immediately after World War I? And why, in the seven decades we have had in the century, have these two produced the greatest generation gaps, when they seem to be such dissimilar decades?

First, of course, there was rebellion and disillusion at the end of the First World War, and that produced the Twenties, in which a lot of the people who now are extremely Left just expatriated themselves. A whole colony formed in Paris of people who just couldn’t stand this country. It was too awful for them. Hemingway belonged to that generation, Archibald MacLeish belonged to it. But what is new that I never knew then is the violence and disruption. They were rebellious, they made speeches, they wrote books, but they didn’t come into the classroom and say, “By God, you’re not teaching what we like, you’re not going to teach.” That didn’t exist.

This man Herbert Marcuse has written a book, as you know, about the limits of toleration, and he doesn’t want to tolerate people who don’t agree with him. He says you mustn’t tolerate people who are wrong. Those are the people he doesn’t agree with. You mustn’t tolerate the Right or the middle, you must only tolerate the Left, and the Left must decide whom to tolerate. Now, that philosophy, that is new. That is a revival of a thing that started quite differently about the middle of the nineteenth century and became anarchism, with people like Bakunin, who was the great antagonist of Marx. Bakunin was a Russian nobleman who had a romantic view of the Russian serf, and if only he were in charge of things all evil would disappear from the world.

But it was an amiable and decent thing. It was impracticable, of course, and it disappeared, and now it has revived, and that is the significant and dangerous thing about the recent times. We saw it abroad. We saw it in Berkeley. We see it all around: this feeling that you must stop things from happening that you don’t agree with, and that liberalism is the great enemy.

But the power of the economic system is so vast, and yet so destructive and unaware of its destructiveness, that the people who see that power and that destructiveness are frustrated, and feel they can’t work within traditional lines to counter the power, and so the question really is: is the society capable of change?

It is changing all the time. It is changing much more rapidly than we know how to understand it. But can it be remade to your heart’s desire? I would say no, it cannot. And that isn’t because the Right is in control, it is because this is the way of life in which we are embedded. Just as primitive man was embedded in his system of tribes and so on, we’re embedded in this, and we can’t get out of it. It’s like jumping out of your skin.

It is possible that the rebellion of the young may be a product of technology’s getting out of our hands, so that we really have produced a generation that is more different from their parent generation than ever has been the case before. Could you point to a time in history, perhaps, when you believe the same thing happened?

I think you’re absolutely right, and I think it’s fundamental. The technological gap and the generation gap are the same thing. And the young people today are coming into a world for which there was no preparation in custom. There never was a world like this. Not that any revolutionist made it. It was created by technology and science. They don’t know what to do about it, and the older people don’t know what to do about it, either. They don’t understand it themselves. That is absolutely the core of our problems. How will we be able to create a capacity to govern this enormously new and enormously complicated and very rapidly changing social environment? That is the problem. And there’s no answer. We may not solve it in a generation. That’s the problem today. The revolutionary—all that business—is of no importance except as a byproduct of that.

Of course, one of the most revolutionary technological inventions of our time—much more revolutionary I think than people realize generally—is contraception: The Pill. It absolutely knocked the family to pieces. The old reasons for creating and holding families together have been knocked out by this technological interference in the relationship between procreation and sexual life. And that is felt everywhere. There’s no family, there’s no neighborhood, there are no clans.

But how do you get around the problem of being ruled by a generation brought up in a time of slower change? Really, the problem seems to be re-educating Congressmen and Senators and the like, and this is the media’s responsibility. But how do you get at them?

Well, this is an autobiography for me. I have lived through this. I feel it. I have felt it for years. And I have lived right in the midst of this change, never really understanding it very well and knowing I didn’t understand it very well, not knowing what to do about it. I don’t feel able to say what I’m going to tell a Congressman to do. I myself don’t know what to do. We might as well be honest about it with ourselves: we are not in a position yet to re-educate the masses because we don’t know what to teach them. And that is one of the critical conditions of our time.

Is it more important for us to educate the Congressmen or to educate the Middlewestern farmer?

First of all, it’s most important to educate ourselves. And that is really absolutely fundamental. We know what to do about a particular thing, but about the general situation we don’t know. And the fact that we don’t know is perhaps the beginning of wisdom. We’re going to have to create the general knowledge that we don’t know.

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.

Walter Lippmann was the the founding editor of The New Republic and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. He is considered a father of modern American journalism; his 1922 book Public Opinion was formative to the field of media studies. Lippmann died in 1974. Fred Friendly, a former president of CBS News, was a longtime professor at the Columbia Journalism School, where he helped establish the broadcast program. With Edward R. Murrow, he created See It Now, a show credited with changing the tide of public opinion on Senator Joseph McCarthy, leading to his fall from power. Friendly died in 1998.

TOP IMAGE: WALTER LIPPMANN IN ITALY, APRIL 9, 1946; PHOTO BY KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES

Rare Wild Amur Tiger Spotted Walking in the Woods With Cubs

An Amur Tiger and her two baby cubs, estimated to be four or five months old, were caught on camera walking through the snowy woods in Russia. Amur Tigers, formerly known as Siberian Tigers, are the biggest cats in the world. They are extremely rare and considered an endangered species. Some experts estimate fewer than 500 of the animals remain in the wild, where Amur tigers can live for about 10 to 14 years.

UK

From Conrad’s Kurtz to Enoch Powell
Conservatism Takes a Dark Turn to the Past
Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu
23 December 2021

Enoch Powell in 1969. Photo: PA Images

Under Boris Johnson’s leadership, the Conservative Party has reversed half a century of attempts at post-imperial reform, and – regardless of whether the Prime Minister stays or goes – is now embarked on an ethno-nationalist, protectionist, statist project, with major institutional changes afoot, observe Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu

The 1899 novella Heart of Darkness by the Polish-born novelist Joseph Conrad laid bare the brutality of the colonial project of European powers in Africa – focusing on the fictional character of Kurtz, an ivory trader and post commander on the Congo River, driven into savagery: the coloniser devoured by the brutality racistly ascribed to the colonised.

The work inspired Francis Ford Coppola’s epic 1979 war movie, Apocalypse Now, exploring America’s own corruption by its neocolonial exploits in Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s. Marlon Brando brought to life the paranoia of Kurtz in his memorable portrayal, with the declaration to “exterminate the brutes!” and his dying words “the horror… the horror”, both of which appear in Conrad’s book.

In the original – based on Conrad’s own experience in colonial Africa – the disturbing story is recounted by a steamship captain who had navigated the Congo River, Charles Marlow, now moored up on a ship in the port of London. It ends on a sombre understanding that the Thames itself “seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness”. Both the film and book suggest that colonisers are changed by colonisation, just as much as the colonised – incorporating both the guilt and supremacy of an ‘empire state of mind’ into their psyches.

It is a dark current which still flows through British politics to this day.

Back in 1968, when the would-be Conservative leader Enoch Powell made his famous claim that racial resentment would destroy Britain and that he could see the River Tiber would be “foaming with much blood”, the Conservative Party was faced with another classic scene from Latin literature: a Rubicon.

Would post-Imperial Britain, having conquered a quarter of the world and helped during two world wars by colonial soldiers and workers to support it, instead turn on its new multi-ethnic citizenry back in the home country? Would the global colonial project turn into a domestic one – creating a racialised system of conflict, suppression and violence: from the enemies overseas to the enemies within?

Like Kurtz, Powell’s speech was full of psychological projection and the fear of retribution, as he predicts that the black man will have the “whip hand” in 50 years’ time over those who have “found themselves made strangers in their own country”. This is, of course, a reverse colonial mentality: having actually made people strangers in their own countries and exerting a very real whip hand, the coloniser feels that it will inevitably happen to him.

Powell’s doom-laden projection of racial warfare never came to fruition in 2018. But the underlying apocalypse needs no end date, and Powell’s “evil” genius (“evil” was how The Times described the watershed speech) was to make it a constant, future threat – one which is always around the corner; or on boats heading across the Channel.

From George Orwell to Priti Patel How Britain Brought its Colonial Policing Home
Hardeep Matharu and Peter Jukes

Brexit and Othering

Powell’s version of Britain was effectively suppressed within the Conservative party half a century ago. But, as Byline Times columnist Peter Oborne explained in an interview with Byline TV, “it’s very fascinating that that great historic battle which appeared to have been won by Edward Heath, has actually been won by Enoch Powell – through the medium of Boris Johnson”.

The seeds of Powell’s politics of othering were sown in Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings’ Vote Leave campaign during the 2016 Brexit referendum. Although they distanced themselves from Nigel Farage’s overtly racist ‘Breaking Point’ poster, they employed the same dog whistles by claiming significant numbers of Turks would be coming to Britain and that this, along with immigration from other countries in the Middle East, posed a terrorist threat. Many other variations from this playbook have been deployed by Johnson’s Government ever since.

Five years on, these seeds have flourished and spread. The Brexit vision – for all its claims to be about a ‘global’, outward-looking Britain – has crystallised into an ethno-nationalist project, predicated on the ‘threats’ from abroad and fifth columnists within.

Now the country has finally exited the EU, the attempts to blame ‘Brussels bureaucrats’ are harder to maintain – though various Conservative MPs and ministers attempt to blame perfidious France over fishing rights in the Channel. Though quick to summon up mythic images of Britain standing alone in World War Two, the Europeans don’t make good enemies these days. Through countless physical, economic and cultural ties, we are too close to them – and Johnson’s Britain has none of the economic power, or imperial hinterland, to genuinely go it alone. But the ethno-nationalist vision always requires barbarians at the gates – so new ones are needed.

In the first half of 2021, a major domestic front was also opened up with a ‘War on Woke’; a crusade to find enemies in culture and civil society. The campaign had limited success.

As that faltered, the Home Secretary opened up a new front, both in high profile PR campaigns and in legislation, against more easily demonised barbarians at the gates: ‘illegal migrants’ crossing the Channel in boats – even though the majority of them turn out to be genuine asylum seekers; among them the many abandoned by the UK’s peremptory evacuation of Afghanistan.

While Johnson constantly plays with the fires of division, it is the Home Secretary he has chosen – a daughter of immigrants and the granddaughter of refugees, Priti Patel – who is the figurehead feeding the flames. She presides over a hardline approach towards certain ‘bad’ and ‘undeserving’ immigrants – the same attitude that Enoch Powell and others expressed towards the Ugandan Asians welcomed to Britain by Ted Heath. For Powell, despite their British passports, Patel’s relatives weren’t really British and should have gone “back” to India. Despite this, his perpetual, future threat from ‘others’ is a key pillar of her department’s policies.

The dehumanisation of asylum seekers and the stoking of fears of being ‘swamped’ by immigrants is not unique to British politics, nor to Patel. It accelerated under the brief post-Brexit tenure of Theresa May as Prime Minister, when she made a distinction between those who ‘belonged’ and “citizens of nowhere” – be they feckless cosmopolitan elites or foreign marauders.

Almost inevitably, just as the versions of leaving the EU became more and more extreme, so has this othering of strangers – until Britain has become estranged from itself. The imagined porosity of our external borders has created new, hard internal borders – literally in the case of the Irish Sea and the transit of goods between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

Resisting the threat of alien invasion has metastasized – as in the case of Shamima Begum – into a policy of removing the inalienable rights of British citizens. We are all potentially citizens of nowhere now.

From Folkloreto Wokelore How Myths of Britishness are Turning Totalitarian
Peter Jukes and Hardeep Matharu

Sado-Populism

The removal of historic citizenship rights is just one part of a spiral of escalation that acts out the often unconscious ethno-nationalist thinking behind the Vote Leave regime that took power in 2019. Nothing is enough for the world of Leave.

We were told we would remain close to Europe and stay in the single market or a customs union. But, at each stage, the rhetoric became more extreme until we achieved an ultra-hard Brexit, just short of a no ‘deal’.

The rupture with the EU became a rupture within the UK. Exiting the EU soon became an excuse to abandon our own traditions, with voter suppression measures to deter voting, neutering of the Electoral Commission, and two new bills on borders and policing removing ancient rights of identity and protest. Soon, Boris Johnson was not only promising to break international law over the Good Friday Agreement, but also unlawfully trying to usurp the sovereignty of Parliament by proroguing it.

A year into full withdrawal, the acceptance of – sometimes celebration of – the material economic harm of leaving the EU merely emphasises how Enoch Powell is a much more important influence on the Conservative Vote Leave Government than Adam Smith, Freidrich Hayek or the liberal or neoliberal thinkers who dominated the party for the past 40 years.

So important is the narrow ethno-nationalist project, Johnson’s Government is willing to abandon all the previous Thatcherite nostrums of small government, fiscal frugality, free trade and open markets. These days, Brexiters openly talk – in ‘sado-populist’ terms – about how leaving the EU must be costly, and only worth it because it hurts. We summon our sovereign pride by material suffering, and those sacrifices of trade, living standards and international connection, are like wafts of sacred incense around the altar of national purity.

And with that, the Vote Leave project will have achieved its hidden objective – and, like Conrad’s Kurtz – have left the norms and standards of the modern world.

UK

‘A Total Waste of Police Time’

Labour Rows Over Drugs Policy as Cannabis Offences Surge

John Lubbock
5 January 2022

London Mayor Sadiq Khan, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick, and Home Secretary Priti Patel. Photo: PA Images/Alamy

New data shows a mounting drugs problem in England and Wales, while Labour and the Conservatives remain committed to status quo solutions, reports John Lubbock

Total recorded drug offences increased in England and Wales by 19% from 2019/20 to 2020/21, with possession of cannabis recording a 21.5% increase, according to data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) compiled in a new parliamentary report.

“The main drug offence recorded in 2020/21 was ‘possession of cannabis’ (63%), followed by ‘possession of controlled drugs (excluding cannabis)’ (18%), ‘trafficking in controlled drugs’ (18%),” the report states.

The statistics are increasingly relevant amid a disagreement between Labour Party Leader Keir Starmer and Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, who is considering the effective decriminalisation of cannabis and other Class B drugs in a pilot scheme – employing a method known as ‘diversion’ – that will offer young people counselling or “speeding course-style” classes instead of prosecution.

As a Class B drug, the maximum prison sentence for possession of cannabis is currently five years.

14,900 penalty notices for disorder (PNDs) were issued in 2020/21, with possession of cannabis the second most common reason for a PND after a person being ‘drunk and disorderly’. 25% fewer PNDs were issued in 2020/21 than in 2019/20 and 60% fewer than five years ago.

However, while custodial sentences for most crimes have been falling for the past decade, a greater proportion of drug offences are receiving prison sentences.

According to the parliamentary report, between 2008/09 and 2019/20, the proportion of drug offenders receiving a caution fell from 46% to 30%, while the proportion receiving a custodial sentence increased from 9% to 16%. This goes against the general trend for all offences whereby the number of people sentenced immediately to prison is falling.

Average prison sentences for drug offences have also risen. The average sentence for drug trafficking in 2020 was 43.6 months, compared to 3.9 months for possession offences, according to the report. In 2012, 25% of drug offences resulted in prison time of at least three years – which increased to 40% in 2020.

The report also notes that on 30 June 2021, there were just under 14,000 people in prison for drug offences – 16% of the overall prison population. As reported by the Guardian in 2020, “people from Asian and other minority ethnic groups are 1.5 times more likely to go to prison for drugs offences than white people”.

While convictions for drug offences have been increasing, convictions for common assault have been falling since 2015, and only 1.6% of the 50,210 reported rape cases in England and Wales in 2020 led to a conviction.

Statistics also show worsening health outcomes for drug users.

“The number of deaths related to drug poisoning have increased year on year from 2,652 in 2011 to 4,561 in 2020,” the report states. “This represents a 72% increase. 2020 saw a 4% increase in deaths compared to 2019.” Drug misuse accounted for 13% of accidental deaths in 2020.

Old Thinking

These statistics suggest that current drugs policy is not working and contradict the official stance of the Labour Party.

Keir Starmer told journalists at a press conference yesterday: “I’m not in favour of us changing the law or decriminalisation, and I’m very clear about that… I’m not in favour of changing drugs laws.”

The Prime Minister’s spokesperson agreed, saying that “decriminalisation would leave organised criminals in control while risking an increase in drug use, which drives a climate of violence”.

But organised crime is already in control of the illegal drugs trade and reported use of drugs in the UK has been rising since 2013.

According to the ONS, “following a period of falls between year ending December 1995 and year ending March 2013, there was a change in the trend. Between the year ending March 2013 and March 2020, the proportion of adults reporting any drug use in the last year has increased by 15% (16- to 59-year-olds) and 28% (16- to 24-year-olds) respectively”.

Ant Lehane, of the Labour Campaign for Drug Policy Reform, told Byline Times: “As many Labour councils move towards diversionary measures which save police time and reduce reoffending, it is shameful that the Home Office has overseen an increase of over 20% for simple cannabis possession offences.

“This is a total waste of police time, and will place further strain on the criminal justice system which has been decimated by the Tories. It’s time for bold measures such as full decriminalisation. Instead, we are stuck with a Prime Minister who dresses up as a police officer to seem ‘tough on crime’.”

DAVID LAMMY ‘Young People are Dying On Our Streets– We Need to Get On with Legalising Cannabis’

But senior figures in the Conservative and Labour parties currently refuse to treat drug misuse as a health rather than a criminal problem. This is despite polling which shows that the British public has been growing increasingly open to the idea of liberalising drug laws.

According to a 2018 YouGov poll, 43% support legalisation and 41% oppose it, while the remaining 15% don’t know. Another poll in 2019 showed 48% support for legalisation for recreational drug use and 77% support for legalising medical cannabis.

The UK is actually the world’s biggest producer of medical cannabis for export to other countries, but it remains illegal in the UK. A private members’ bill has been put before Parliament which would legalise medical cannabis, proposed by MP Jeff Smith, leader of the Labour Campaign for Drug Policy Reform, but the bill has little realistic chance of passing.

A Home Office spokesperson told Byline Times that “the Government has no plans to decriminalise harmful drugs” and that Sadiq Khan “has no powers to do so and the police are always expected to uphold and enforce the law”.

“Decriminalising drugs would lead to lawlessness and hand over control of our communities to organised criminals, pushing up serious violence and its corrosive impact on mainly young black men in London,” they added.

UK

‘Refugees and Migrants Do Not Come From a Different World’
Malka Al-Haddad
5 January 2022

The cover of 'The Other Side of Hope'

Malka Al-Haddad introduces a new magazine aiming to challenge stereotypes about refugees and migrants by showcasing their writing and editing and building a ‘bridge’ of understanding

The Other Side of Hope: Journeys in Refugee and Immigrant Literature is a new literary journal edited by immigrants and refugees based in the UK. The magazine seeks to break down stereotypes about migrants and refugees by showcasing their writing and aims to support those careers that may have been cut short because of exile and migration.

It was created because there is no other similar literary magazine in the country. This type of publication should have happened years ago but because it didn’t, we made it happen. Arts Council England funded us and we are supported by Journeys Festival International.

As immigrant editors, we believe that people need to understand each other, and this magazine exists to enable people to gain insights into us – our lives, our talents and our stories. It aims to be a bridge that will bring us closer through literature, and we want it to become a home for refugee and immigrant writers of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, and for those writers who know about us and want to support us.

Our first print and online issues have now been published. The annual print issue is available to buy from our website and the online version is free to read.

So far, we have published work from 120 refugee and immigrant writers from across the world in the genres of fiction and poetry, as well as non-fiction, book reviews and author interviews on the theme of migration.

This magazine is hugely important because it provides the opportunity to hear the voices of refugees and migrants, and for them to exhibit their literary and artistic talents in describing their experiences and telling their stories. It is an opportunity to build bridges with others who do not know about the experiences of refugees and are unaware of the wealth of talent within immigrant communities.

It is important to unite people through the literary cultures of the world because we live in a world of division and distance from others. We extend a message of love and understanding to others – our world needs cultural exchange, people need to listen to each other and learn what is good in each other’s cultures.

We hope this magazine will go some way to achieving this. It is an opportunity to love each other, acknowledge each other and understand each other, so that our world can one day live in peace.

We are exhausted by wars and conflicts, and we must stop the madness of hatred and the madness of racism, because continuing the cycle of war and conflict will bring destruction to all. We must unite for peace and live in harmony, understanding and acceptance of each other.

We are refugees and immigrants, we did not come from a different world.

Malka Al-Haddad is the poetry editor of the ‘Other Side of Hope’

Hardeep Matharu speaks to Romanian-born Labour county councillor Dr Alex Bulat about damaging political narratives around migration, the insidious nature of British prejudice and why she has always felt more at home in the UK

If Someone Told Me to Go Back and Live In Romania, I Would Really Struggle’

Hardeep Matharu

22 December 2021

Labour Cambridgeshire county councillor Dr Alex Bulat. Photo: Dr Alex Bulat

People with negative views towards migrants should put themselves in their shoes and ask themselves how they would feel if British people studying and working in other parts of Europe were scapegoated and stereotyped by politicians, the press and public, a Romanian-born Cambridge county councillor has told Byline Times.

Dr Alex Bulat first came to the UK aged three for seven months when her father – at that time a junior doctor – was invited to work in an NHS hospital in Leeds.

Having moved back here to study aged 18, she is now a Labour representative on Cambridgeshire County Council, as well as the co-founder of Migrants4Labour group and the co-chair of the Young Europeans Network at the 3 Million – a campaigning group to protect pre-Brexit rights for EU citizens.

Speaking to Byline Times, she said that one of the key aspects missing from politicised debates about migration – which could challenge people to reconsider their negative views in a constructive way – is people “seeing themselves in that situation”.

“Would they say similarly about British people living, working and studying in Spain?,” she asked. “What if the Spanish Government said those same horrible things about British people. Would they be happy? Of course not – therefore we’re not happy that those things are said about Romanians in the UK.”

Although Dr Bulat was very young when she first came to Britain, she said she always had a sense of wanting to return because of her early memories of the UK being “very welcoming”, diverse and “tolerant” – a view she admits has been “challenged at various points in my journey later on”.

“When I came here as a child, I didn’t really know anyone, I couldn’t really communicate for the first days,” she told Byline Times. “But all the children were really welcoming and we all made very good friends. I had this impression of the UK as being a very welcoming place, which was also a very multi-ethnic group.

“I grew up in a very white Romanian area and the only people who were migrants were the students who came for medical school from Turkey, Greece and other nearby countries. So, I didn’t grow up in a multicultural environment but that’s what I liked about the UK – a very tolerant country, which welcomes all cultures. So, I had only a completely positive image of the UK as a country.”

The Story of Brexit isthe Story of Empire

Why Did Asian Immigrants Vote to Leave the EU?
Hardeep Matharu

In 2012, aged 18, she moved to the UK to study a sociology and media studies degree at Sussex University. She then went on to complete a Master’s degree at Cambridge University and a PhD at University College London on political sociology and migration studies. Brexit and the weaponisation of migration – now a central pillar in the Vote Leave Government’s ‘culture war’ agenda – has served as the backdrop of her time in the UK.

Politically disengaged when she arrived, Dr Bulat said that changed when debates around the 2016 EU Referendum started. “It was the first moment when I realised that decisions in this country will affect me directly – if the vote goes to leave the EU then this will ultimately affect my rights in the country so I should pay attention to politics,” she said.

After the referendum result, she volunteered to advise Romanian migrants in the UK about their rights, at a time people were “scared”, “confused” and didn’t know what to do.

“One of the things I will always remember was that I was watching the referendum results on the TV in college with other students and one of my French colleagues said – after we found out the result – that it was the first time she felt like a migrant in the UK,” she told Byline Times. “I asked her ‘what do you mean?’ because I always felt as such or I have been made to feel as such.”

The 27-year-old said that the reaction to her presence in the UK has always been mixed and that this didn’t really change with the EU Referendum.

“In my first months in the UK, I do remember people asking me where am I from and some people would be ‘lovely, I’ve been to Romania’ or ‘I have Romanian friends’, but some people were quite negative,” she said. “They were saying the usual stereotypes about coming here to steal jobs or benefits or Romanians being criminals or negative views about the Romanian Roma community. It was not that I was always perceived as positive and then Brexit happened and, suddenly, I became this undesirable migrant.

“But I also speak from the perspective of a Romanian and Romanians have always had quite a negative image in the UK. The worst moment for me was actually 2014 because Romanians were suddenly given full rights to work in the UK and I remember all the tabloid media – especially on the right like the Daily Mail, Daily Express and so on – having the big headlines about ‘millions of Romanians invading the UK, coming to flood the job market’.”

She said that it took her time to understand the under-the-surface, insidious nature of prejudice which operates in Britain, whereby “some people have negative views towards migrants but they didn’t express them openly”, and believes that “Brexit often offered a platform for some people to express them more openly”.

“Growing up in Romania, some of my neighbours and people quite close to me, had negative views about migration and I grew up in quite a monocultural society,” she said. “So often you hear quite xenophobic or racist views but in Romania they were always, always expressed very openly without any shame. So then people could say ‘that’s wrong’ or debate it, but it was never hidden.

“And that’s what I realised [in the UK] when I was in conversations where people were like ‘it’s not about you, you’re okay, you’re studying, I’m not racist, it’s the others’ and I realised that there was something, culturally, I hadn’t understood before. The more I lived in the UK, the more I understood the nuances of this. When I arrived here, I thought if no one says anything negative to my face it means they’re okay with me, but that’s not always the case.”

Putting party politics aside, what she finds most upsetting about the leadership of the likes of Boris Johnson, Priti Patel and Michael Gove is their detachment from the impact of their decisions on real people’s lives. For her, one example of this was their promise, before the 2016 referendum, that the rights of EU citizens in the UK would be secure – before later announcing that they would need to apply for settled status. Another is Boris Johnson not knowing that most migrants have ‘no recourse to public funds’ and therefore cannot claim benefits.

“A lot of the people in power in government right now are not interested in, let alone have, that lived experience,” Dr Bulat told Byline Times. “They don’t actually listen to the people who are affected by their policies. A hostile policy gets created but then a lot of the people involved have no idea how it will impact people on a day-to-day basis. It is disappointing to see people in politics who are very far removed from the realities.”

This is why she entered politics – to get issues such as immigration, from the viewpoint of migrants, on the agenda. “If you don’t have those voices in politics, change will be very, very slow,” she added.
Hardeep Matharu explores Priti Patel’s hardline approach towards other immigrants on Byline TV

The response to her political role has been mainly positive. “I never encountered anyone questioning my right to stand for election, my accent or where I’m from,” she said. “But I represent an area in Cambridge which is a very multicultural city, it is very different politically from the rest of the country.”

Online, Dr Bulat finds it’s a different story. “I encounter a lot of racist, xenophobic comments online. The classic ‘why should you have the right to stand for office when you weren’t born in the UK?’ or ‘obviously she wants to be in politics to bring more migrants in’ to just very personal, negative comments about me as a person. When people are not in front of you, and don’t have to say those things to your face, I think that makes a difference.”

One of the main narratives on migration in Britain, according to the councillor, is that migrants will be tolerated rather than welcomed. Even during the Coronavirus crisis, she says, a political choice was made to side-line their contributions.

“A lot of the press debate is ‘well, of course we want doctors and nurses and students – we just don’t want those low-skilled migrants’,” she told Byline Times. “And we have seen how this completely shifted in COVID times, when so many of our politicians suddenly realised that, actually, our hospitals can’t function without doctors, but they also can’t function without cleaners. So, the previously low-skilled, low-paid, undesirable people became the ‘key workers’ – but we still don’t hear a lot about migrant key workers.”

Having obtained settle status, Dr Bulat is also now a British citizen. When she first told friends she was applying for it, some of them asked her: “Why would you want to be a citizen of a country that treats migrants so badly?” But she sees her identity as very much connected to Britain.

“For me, it’s not only a practicality – you feel safer with citizenship – although I’m not so sure with this Borders and Nationality Bill now, but I genuinely consider myself part of the UK and having both British and Romanian citizenship reflects my identity,” she said.

“Growing up in Romania, I never particularly felt attached to a certain nationality. I’m not the person who follows all the Romanian traditions. I do post a message for the Romanian national day and so on, but I’m not the person who eats the traditional food and participates in all the Romanian events and celebrations. I was a bit remote from that even growing up. I felt differently from how my other colleagues or friends did.

“When I moved here, I came with the intention to move permanently. I think this does shape your identity. Because if you come with the intention of ‘this is the country I chose to live in and I will do everything possible to stay here and build my life and career here’, then everything works along those lines.

“All of my life is here. I’ve never worked in Romania, ever. So, if someone said to go theI would really struggle.”