What it Means to be Patriotic, and why Nationalists aren’t

The British government has been caught in a rather embarrassing string of scandals, any one of which would have annihilated a better administration were there any meaningful opposition. Amongst the most bizarre is an email telling the London School of Economics, which advises the government on financial matters, not to allow foreign born experts to contribute to such advice. When confronted with the emails the government flatly stated that it actually allowed foreign academics to give advice, because why would the government of a representative democracy act with greater transparency, intelligence and courage than a child whose mouth is covered in cookie crumbs? During the Conservative Party Conference Home Secretary Amber Rudd declared that businesses would be forced to ‘name and shame’ any foreigners working for them and then the government immediately ‘clarified’, after immense pressure from the business and human communities, that it would do no such thing, since it is appalling to so grossly violate the privacy of people and absolutely sinister to register particular demographics of people. The government has proposed forcing pregnant women to show their passports to receive healthcare: which, given the minuscule cost of health tourism — and the fact that we’re rather fond of doing it ourselves when we go abroad — has rather obviously more to do with forcing poor mothers to purchase a passport as a grotesque poll tax on receiving the most basic medical care there is. You may have noticed a theme here.

One of the principal reasons given for voting to leave the EU in exit polls was the right to restrict migration. Taking note of this, one of the keynote pieces of nonsense in May’s address to the EU was her peculiar focus on the notion that ‘economic migrants’ are piggybacking off refugees and placing undue pressure on our public services, stealing from the mouths of our own citizenry by contributing more in taxes than they take in public services. Sensing the welcome arms thrown open by the British government to the desperate and needy, our shores are apparently awash with hordes of lazy scroungers looking to work.

We know May to be lying: ‘economic migrants’ do not place burdens on our economy or local services. Study after study all over the western world and in the UK in particular have demonstrated that ‘economic migrants’ do not squander our resources or steal our jobs. Schrödinger’s immigrant in its full superposition is thus: immigrants stand accused of simultaneously taking benefits without working to contribute to the nation and of taking jobs away from locals by working. Both claims are demonstrably false, even according to the government’s own study on the matter; indeed, both suggestions stand entirely contrary to what we know about how economics works.

The explanation is relatively straightforward: people moving country to look for a job are younger, healthier, more able and more willing to work than the average person and therefore less likely to need welfare. More people working means more people consuming — we cannot help ourselves, we bloody love Minions and that Christmas Coca-Cola lorry — and as demand rises more needs to be produced, requiring more people working. Consumers are the fundamental driving force behind neo-liberal economies: our temptation to be dazzled by the celebrity of the innovative and wealthy job creator, who is supplying what consumers demand, blinds us, but usually not them, to this fact.

Foreign workers spend money which encourages job growth. The proportion looking to use our benefits system, let alone exploit it unfairly, is smaller than the proportion of Britons doing the same; unlike British citizens, our immigrants contribute more to the Treasury than they take. Foreigners are not stealing jobs and they are not ruining our public services; the flexibility of our workforce is one of the fundamental planks of our economy’s strength, and the hard work and skills of economic migrants is literally the reason we can have public services and enjoy our world class, enviable quality of life.

The effect is so obvious and undeniable that those who seek to scapegoat foreigners for their own deficiencies must concoct new fictions: thus the allegation that, since they do not steal jobs, they must be willing to work for less, driving down wages. This is also untrue across every industry: workers move to enjoy the market rates of the countries they move to, not the market rates of the countries they are leaving. Common sense, and rather fortunately for one’s self worth science, too, point out that decent wages are what they are upending their entire lives in pursuit of after all. There is also a mythology that migrant workers are generally unskilled. The opposite is true: migrant workers are typically better skilled and more productive than their average British counterpart, providing skills and knowledge that are difficult to come by in the UK, and they transmit those skills to British workers, making us better individually and more competitive globally. Our jobs are more secure and our industries more internationally ambitious as a result of our phenomenally multifaceted workforce. And for those economic migrants who are less skilled — such as the hundreds of thousands employed in agriculture — there are literally no Britons to replace their dwindling numbers, which is already severely handicapping the ability of our farmers to meet demand. But perhaps it makes sense to pay farmers a great deal of money to produce a harvest they throw away.

Right wing think tank — a term that used to have meaning beyond partisan fiscal safety net for political mercenaries — Civitas tried to counter these numbers by suggesting that immigrants are responsible for the exceptional fiscal effort we put into preventing them from coming here: thereby inadvertently proving that, in addition to being a more moral nation, we would be a far richer one if we simply paid for a fraction of the number of border control agents, and then merely for them to play cards while immigrants cartoonishly sneaked in behind their backs. Since the past few Governments have loved to fling out baffling policy on the fly the migrants perhaps should be required to do so on tiptoes. If our response to immigration is failing it is because it is too harsh. We are not enhanced by making things worse.

There is no economic argument against economic migrants: they make us, their home countries and themselves richer. Opposition to economic migration, to immigration in general derives from racial and national animus, and is not and never has been financial; such is pretence, it has always been and is ideological. This can be a difficult thing for self-proclaimed cynics to accept, because even misguided economic explanations are at least understandable and relatable: in the face of a ruinous war, where hundreds of thousands are killed, the coffers drained, the property of the landed owners annihilated, is the continued enslavement of black people by a significant minority of white households really worth it to so many people? Would people really vote themselves out of an absurdly profitable trade and labour union if it meant the chance to restrict immigration? Would people really rally behind the expense of the mass ghettoisation, expulsion and extermination of a religious and racial minority during the largest war and worst existential crisis your nation has ever faced? Did Londoners burn down half of their own city during America’s battle for independence because of the merest threat that English Catholics would gain a sliver of the political and social rights enjoyed by any other subject of the King? When we simply lack the raw materials for medical care that waiting lists extend to months or years for transplants and skilled surgery would modern western nations really deny the right of gay men to donate blood and organs?

Which leads us to an inescapable conclusion. We are prone to talking of nationalism as if it were some kind of patriotism that has gone too far, as if it merely constituted a love of country so great that it blinds a person to that nation’s faults. We are then supposed to assume it is a coincidence that they have fettered and driven backwards every country they have gained power in, from Romania to Italy to Spain to Portugal to Germany to Argentina, entire generations of growth, intellectually, socially, financially — often, too, literal generations of people — were lost. Nationalists — running the tangled gamut in Britain from white supremacists, neoNazis and other fascists, UKIP, less politically involved racists and other white nationalists, all of whom constantly try to rebrand themselves to escape the stigma of their incompetence and cruelty — are unpatriotic. The wealth and security of their nation, its ability to project strength and shape the values of the world around them are completely irrelevant to them, frequently, even, a stumbling block to their few aims.

With the comforting reinforcement of their compatriots bigots become exceptionally passionate about their beliefs; their prejudices often become the most important idea they have, the one they cherish most. Sometimes, in those nations without so much plenty, they even find enough courage to die for them. Sometimes, in those nations with so much plenty, they find the courage to murder decent people for them. They have a morality: they are people, they are sapient, they judge. It is merely that their morality is cretinous and wicked, and insofar as it is contradicted by their country’s strengths, they despise it. We know intuitively not to trust in the courage of a person who declares themselves brave: bravery is proven by act, not proclamation. So too is the willingness to cloak oneself in the flag completely overshadowed by the behaviour of those nationalists dishonest enough to suggest they love their country.

A patriot does not say ‘you can come to Britain from anywhere in the world and get diagnosed with HIV and get the retroviral drugs that cost up to £25,000 per year per patient’ with a sneer, they say it with pride. Because despite that reality, despite the fact that most people diagnosed in the UK with HIV-AIDS are foreign born, our system is so well constructed, so efficient, our conscientiousness so impressed on those people who seek out our shores to build their lives — that immigrants, still, give more to the rest of us than they take. We have so much that such crucial healthcare — prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of individuals who need it — is an obvious right to us, and we give it freely. What kind of dull, jealous, squalid little man would feel anything other than awe at this unimaginably impressive society we have built? We get to be good and it makes us money — we have gotten to have our cake and eat it too for an exceptionally long time, and it is a disservice that our society does not celebrate the fruits we all enjoy from our exalted, complex society, built from the best the globe has to offer.

A patriot does not get elected to the EU and then completely fail to represent or stand up for the country of his birth by having the lowest attendance record of any of the 746 MEPs bar a gentleman literally unable to attend due to paralysis: instead Farage has suckled from the teat of taxpayers for almost 30 years and in that entire time rarely done any actual work, much like the rest of UKIP and, indeed, nationalist parties from all over Europe. A patriotic party does not write a manifesto explaining its ideas to the public and then denounce its own manifesto as ‘drivel’, because actual governance, the actual goals, direction, resilience, strength and mien of a nation is an immaterial, piffling afterthought to them. A patriot concerned by the influence of lobbyist money on their country’s democracy, of a small number of people corrupting the political landscape with sneaky, dirty cash, who believes the chant of ‘drain the swamp’, does not then fill his cabinet with lobbyists — which now includes former Goldman Sachs partner Steven Mnuchin. The modern fascist does not fight for their country, does not care about running it well, thinks nothing of lying to the public: they fixate on one idea, their bigotry. To the extent that they may deceive the economically vulnerable the truth of all of this must be trumpeted, must be fought for. All they have in response is violence, threats and lies. Such is their paltry weakness and the persuasive power of the effluvia they call their beliefs.

Eagerness to restrict access to one’s nation is such a grey, bleak concept of identity, so devoid of any warmth or pride that those who believe in it are likely insipid enough to mistake it for being practical. It is difficult to conceive of how any joy can be derived from a concept of country or self that is predicated upon restricting access to a thing: it makes us no stronger, safer, richer, more educated. It adds nothing to the tapestry of our communities. When no one gains anything from an action it seems senseless, madness to pursue it. The free movement of trade, labour and people is the second finest of our traditions, a close second to defeating the sort of fascist who once more has risen his head in defiance of our splendour.

The cultures and values woven into the fabric of Britain make it exciting, cosmopolitan; make it a world leader in games development, pharmaceutical and medical research, aerospace and automotive engineering; our industries are embedded in our neighbours, who themselves are dependent upon us, to the enrichment of both. Our nation stands tall because of its tradition of cultural and social openness: our music, our film, our literature, our cuisine, our social lives have been enriched and expanded massively by the perpetual influx of people excited to take part in who we are, as we have exported so much of our own values, our own art, our own beliefs to the world around us. This is something to be celebrated, to take pride in: it is to the prestige of who we are that our civilisation is one that openly admits it is strengthened, not weakened, as it increases in size and scope; that it not merely survives contact with the outside world but thrives. Our decency, our compassion, our incredible generosity has been rewarded with luxury, education, healthcare and working conditions better than any in history. Our sense of liberal democracy is so strong, the ideas behind it so obviously right, that it glories in the addition of other ideas, humanities, individuals — it is for the meek, cowardly, incompetent autocrat to ban thoughts and peoples. Our society, our plurality and transparency and honesty, our love of civility and argument defeat those ideas that stand in grim, miserable opposition on their own account. They always have.