Alex Powell (Guest, Author and Legal Scholar) (36:01)
Yeah, I mean, it's really quite alarming, the situation that that's arisen over the past few years. Now, I think it's important firstly to say that I would situate LGBTQA plus immigration and asylum in particular, particular as sitting at the intersection or invention of two different, but also conjoined moral panics. So firstly, there is a moral panic around immigration and asylum, particularly around the highly racialized and spectacularized image of small boats. Now this, I think you can see that this is a moral panic in the sense of that people seeking asylum, people traveling over on small boats, making irregular journeys, become sort of blamed for a range of social ills which have nothing whatsoever to do with them. They are in that sense the very traditional folk devil, which is blamed in the context of a moral panic. So, for example, people will talk about how well they can't get a doctor's appointment, and it must be because of all these small. We are talking about an infinitesimally small number of people compared to the population of the UK will have virtually no effect. Yet politicians, including the previous Prime Minister, literally stood on a podium with the legend Stop the boats. It became the only policy in effect of the Conservative Party between 2023 and 2024. It basically dropped a pretense of having any other purpose than seeking to push through their Rwanda plan and address what they saw as the problem of small boats. So there's that moral panic going on, and I'll come back to that in just a second. There's also a second moral panic going on that is the moral panic relating to the rights of trans people, particularly trans women, and the false perception that these undermine the rights of cisgender women. Again, here you have sort of representation of a very, very small, vulnerableized, for many other reasons, group of people presented as if they were the biggest threat to women's rights and as if, for example, patriarchy wasn't an ongoing issue in the uk Again becoming a central talking point for politicians in a way that sort of defies all rational thought. You know, in the uk there were situations where one of the questions of Prime Minister's questions, which happens every Wednesday, and his chance for the leader of the opposition, the head of the opposition party in the UK as well as other members of Parliament to ask questions of the Prime Minister. You had questions being raised in that setting by the Prime Minister of the leader of the opposition of whether or not a woman could have a penis. It's absurd that these things were going on, but these sorts of Moral panics are not. I guess the point is, they'd be laughable if they weren't so dangerous. Of course, the reality is that when you see these kinds of moral panics, what they do is they play on existing ideas of the dangerous other. So across social scientific literature, you might refer to them as the subaltern, the other, but you have this figure who is constructed as being outside of the people and who is represented as an existential threat to the people. Now, in immigration and asylum, as well as in LGBTIQA groupings, you have people who are being represented as somehow a threat to the general public, a threat, if you like, to the normal. I'm doing extreme scare quotes around normal population. Now, you know this. Firstly, it's really important to say that Gayle Rubin has very clearly theorized how anxieties about gender and sexuality often figure at moments of hegemony. So I've talked already about that sort of war of position, and this is. This is part of that. But what this has meant is that in the uk, both politicians and the media have spent basically four years telling the public that the reason everything is broken is because of us very small people of number, because of a very small number of people seeking asylum. And they've also spent years telling the public that they could deal with this if only those lawyers would get out of the way. Now, there have been some extremely dangerous moments in that, including home secretaries making reference to lawyers in the same category as people smugglers, implicitly, or at least I won't say quite implicitly, but implying that lawyers are engaging in forms of human trafficking. We've also seen prime ministers talk about legal challenges to their plans, particularly the Rwanda plan, which was the plan to send people seeking asylum for processing to the Republic of Rwanda, to have their claim processed in Rwanda and then to be given refugee status if successful in Rwanda. We've seen politicians talking about lawyers challenging this through the courts through legitimate means within a liberal democracy established along the lines that were generally agreed upon a decade ago as enemies of the people. And also using the idea of, you know, the will of the people. It's worth saying, literally no one ever voted for that plan because it wasn't in any manifesto. There was no mechanism anyone could express a vote for that plan. So it would be rather a strange interpretation of the will of the people. I would say there that there could even be some allusion to the idea that if you think that's the will of the people, you may be trying to embody a sort of almost a Schmidtian dictatorial stance where you see yourself as personally embodying the will of the people. Again, I'm not necessarily making personal allegations there, but there is a very pervasive anti liberal, anti democratic logic to this as well. But what that has meant is that in the interviews, I was really struck just by the number of legal practitioners who made references to feeling unsafe to do their job, who made references to having, for example, their address leaked online on far right forums, who talked about having to close down their office, I. E. Not be able to do their job or see people seeking asylum in their workplace because, again, the address of the office had been found on a far right blog and therefore they now needed the police to do a sweep because credible threats had been made against the lives of the staff worked in there. In August 2024 in the UK, we saw dramatic false allegations spread that the perpetrator of the Southport attack was an asylum seeker. This resulted in multiple days of rioting, which included rioters attempting to burn down a hotel housing asylum seekers. The level of dehumanisation resulting from these moral panics is incredibly dangerous. And it has reached a level where, you know, I guess bluntly, many legal practitioners do, from these interviews, fear for their lives doing. Doing this job. Now, obviously, most of them are extremely professional. They want to keep doing this. They really care about the people they represent. And I think it's also worth pointing out, though, that, you know, legal aid, immigration and asylum work is not well paid. And a whole nother element of this is the frequent populist tendency to refer to sort of fat cat lawyers. Was the quote Boris Johnson used that they certainly are extremely well paid lawyers. They are not human rights lawyers by and large. So, you know, it was really striking just to sort of talk to people about how they, as professionals, also felt unsafe. Now, to be clear, you know, that's nothing on how many of their clients were feeling. So, you know, practitioners were also telling me about how with the announcements of the Rwanda plan, they experienced people, they were representing people seeking asylum, running away from hotels, needing major mental health interventions because they were terrified that the things that the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister were saying referred to them. There's also just the broader things. These kinds of announcements also fueled just considerable anxiety. And the whole other undocumented element of that is just the number of further sector organizations and legal practitioners who had to spend days of their working time where they could have been representing their clients, fielding anxious phone calls and reassuring people that, no, if you've already lodged your claim this doesn't affect you because, you know, the government didn't seem to have any regard to what impact these kinds of announcements would have. And I do think it's worth pointing out there that the evidence, including research undertaken by the Home Office itself extensively documents that pull factors, I. E. The idea that people come to the UK because the conditions are good have almost no impact on where people seek asylum. Most people do not know reception conditions prior to arrival. So this, the policies that were being announced which fueled these moral panics, because by the way, the only way in which this policy works is if you inflate the idea that it's a problem that you can then be seen to be solving. That's, that's what the political trade off in inflating the issue is. That's why politicians do. Well, partly maybe it's because they don't understand, but if they are understanding what they're doing, then they're doing it because of the, what's called the signification spiral, where the boat devil becomes seen as more and more deviant and they're where they can be seen as the ones who stepped in to deal with it. Now, if you actually read moral panic theory in full, like generally not a good idea, because all the policy response does is exacerbate further the tension. We have seen that with asylum and immigration. I frankly think that the, the discourse and the narrative and the discussions we now have about asylum and immigration in the UK have no basis whatsoever in reality. I, in the book talked about Judith Butler's notion of a phantasm and I do think we're in a phantasm here. There is a astounding unreality to the way in which public figures talk about asylum immigration. It's completely detached from any concrete reality and it's become imbued of all these social ills. So, you know, there's the safety element, there's also the capacity element. And it's just fundamentally this goes back to what I was saying at the start, right. The reality is reshaped not just through concrete policy, but through the meta politics that is shaped through language and discourse. And what political actors and the media have done in relation to asylum and immigration has created a situation that is extremely dangerous. And you know, I talked in the book as well, like we need to be clear here. I am no longer sure I can say with confidence that in regard to this area, the UK complies with, for example, the UN basic principles on the role of lawyers. I think several statements by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister, for example, were fairly clear cut violation of those. We also have to remember, you know, the UK Government was caught keeping dossiers on lawyers. It was caught keeping a dossier on the immigration lawyer, Jacqueline Mackenzie. So, yeah, I understand why practitioners are scared in this context.