Cosplay Fascists: When noise distracts from unworkable policy
On Tuesday last week, Suella Braverman announced the government’s ‘Illegal Migration Bill’ - ironically, as we discovered, it was literally true in the sense that the contentious bill was, in fact, by their own admission sort of ‘illegal’.
The government made this announcement - first, in the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, and then later in Parliament. On both occasions, they did so without even revealing the detail of the aforementioned Bill.
Why?
Politics as theatre, essentially - or ‘to generate hype’ prior to any actual disclosure of the all-important detail; in policy terms, it was not serious.
Eventually they did release the bill; you can read it here - and sadly, it was taken very seriously indeed. So seriously that many people probably didn’t read it and ended up speaking about other things happening on social media instead.
If social media provides the window to the world, many people [especially from ‘the opposition side’ of the political divide] believed ‘the hype’; for all intents and purposes, all of the highlighted bullet-points in the ‘at a glance’ literature were going to happen, the ‘vile’ and ‘reprehensible’ policies were going to be enacted and we, as far as some commentary was concerned, were on the precipice of becoming ‘like 1930s Germany’.
The main source for this reaction [for England footballing legend Gary Lineker, of all people] never even said this and rather highlighted the language and rhetoric being used by Suella Braverman, a comparison that was not entirely inaccurate. More authoritative sources for this view were Holocaust survivors - including Joan Salter who were warning of the language in November last year.
The problem this page has with this commentary [mostly from social media rather than Lineker, Salter or otherwise] is that, fundamentally, pointing at the language being used and making the comparisons is helpful - as Lineker, Salter et al did. As memories of the Holocaust fade into the history books, those reminders [note: ‘warnings’] seek to educate and inform provided that it isn’t done so flippantly - many times on social media by way of lazy hyperbole or by reducing the true horrors of the Nazi regime to cheap and simplistic memes.
BUT - in terms of how realistic it is in actually materialising (if you have been following social media commentary for the last 4 years relating to any number of different Bills and Acts) we have been on the precipice of becoming ‘like 1930s Germany’ many times with this government. I know. I’ve written about most of it.
So - this article aims to explore why we’re no further down the slippery slope than we were all the many times people told us we were in the past.
Literally, all the ‘many, many’ times.
It’s there to reassure - more than anything, it’s there to remind us of how fundamentally silly this government is. Insofar as every single time they lay something like this at our feet, the moment you begin to work it out, you’ll realise that it’s almost certain not to happen and conscious of the time, they’ll probably slam face first into a pine tree before they descend fully into fascism and reach the bottom of the slippery slope.