06.26.08
jacqui smith - the face of labour’s moral collapse
The worst thing that has ever happened to British politics is the movement of both our leading parties to the centre of the political spectrum. With both the Conservatives and Labour occupying a centre-right position, the ugly face of centrist politics has been revealed. Devoid of strong ideals or leanings, centrist parties find themselves stuffed with politicians who don’t believe in a damned thing except gaining, and then retaining, positions of power.
On Labour’s benches, this much is perfectly obvious from the fact that the party has abandoned any concept of social liberalism. Stop and search powers, 90- and then 42-day detention without charge, increasingly harsh immigration laws and prison sentences, ASBOs, the reclassification of cannabis in the face of all scientific and social evidence… All things which fly in the face of what should have been the whole ethos of the Labour movement, but which have been convenient for a government keen to win headlines for being “tough”.
Earlier this week, perhaps the most utterly unpleasant Home Secretary the Labour administration has produced - yes, even more unpleasant than the arrogant, delusional and self-justifying David Blunkett - managed to come out with what is, to me, the single lowest ebb of everything this government has done from a liberal, progressive or even simply moral standpoint.
Do you see the picture on the right? That’s an image that was spread around the world in 2005, depicting two teenage boys moments before their execution in Iran. Their crime? They were convicted of being homosexual - the Iranians protested that they were “rapists”, by which they meant that the two boys had simultaneously “raped” each other. They were blindfolded, placed on the back of a truck, had nooses hung around their necks from above - and then the truck drove off. There are later pictures from this series, which I have not put here as they are, understandably, incredibly distressing.
Now here’s what Jacqui Smith, our delightful Home Secretary, had to say this week on the question of deporting homosexual asylum seekers back to Iran. “With particular regard to Iran… the evidence does not show a real risk of discovery of, or adverse action against gay and lesbian people who are discreet about their sexual orientation.”
Stonewall, a gay campaign group, reckons that 4,000 people have been executed in Iran since the 1970s for being homosexual. Jacqui Smith disputes that figure - but there’s little dispute over another figure which shows 140 people being executed under the current regime alone for homosexuality. Regardless, Ms Smith’s view is essentially that gay people in Iran are fine as long as they’re “discreet” - shut up, don’t talk about it, and hope every day that nobody with a grudge against you discovers your secret.
Of course, you may have spotted the essential logical flaw in her entire argument. Completely aside from being a disgusting thing for a public servant in a civilised nation to say, the whole statement misses the fact that by coming to the UK and seeking asylum on the grounds of sexuality, refugees from Iran have already given up the option of living “discreetly”. Besides which, if they could, they would - gay people all over the world choose to hide their sexuality in the face of repression because it’s more important to them to be with their family and friends. Those who run from Iran and other countries like it do so at great personal cost and risk, and only do so because they have been found out, or because the strain is no longer bearable - and in both cases, if they don’t face capital punishment for their sexual orientation before they leave, they certainly will upon their return.
Still - who cares about that, when there are headlines to be won in the Daily Mail and the Sun? Figures for the processing of asylum seekers make vital news in this era of focused xenophobia, when much of the population seems to make no distinction between economic migrants and those fleeing persecution. If the cost of making the Home Office - and by extension, this failing, morally bankrupt Labour government - look good is the lives of innocent people whose only crime is their sexual orientation, then so be it. They’re only Iranians anyway, the tabloids will probably assume they were gay terrorists.
By the way, the case that kicked this all off was that of a chap called Mehdi Kazemi, a young gay man from Iran who moved to Brighton to study English in 2005. In 2006, his boyfriend back in Iran (a nation in which Jacqui Smith maintains there is no “real risk of discovery or adverse action” against gay people) was executed for his sexuality - but not before naming Kazemi as his partner during interrogation (for which read “torture”). The Home Office’s reaction was to try to deport Kazemi back to Iran, and only an extensive public campaign on his behalf, as well as multiple legal appeals, made them reverse this decision.
Now Jacqui Smith wants to draw a line in the sand and prevent any more Iranians from escaping through the “loophole” which saved Mehdi Kazemi’s life from a brutal execution. The loophole which she wishes to close is that Britain has traditionally been a compassionate and thoroughly decent nation of people - and having destroyed much of that trust and decency within the nation itself, the next objective seems to be to snatch away any compassion in our dealings with the persecuted, vulnerable people who throw themselves upon our mercy at our borders.
Technorati Tags: asylum, Daily Mail, immigration, Jacqui Smith, Labour, Mehdi Kazemi, politics, The Sun
