Alexander Bowen is an MPP-MIA student at SciencesPo Paris and St Gallen specialising in public health.
When the Australian Liberals warned that “it won’t be easy under Albanese”, I don’t suppose they expected that their warning would apply to migrants.
Yet that’s exactly what’s happening. In December 2023, Australia’s Labor government announced its plan to halve its immigration intake, and now its new Migration Amendment Bill implements some of the measures needed to achieve it. It’s gone far enough for Amnesty International to describe its new legislation as raising the spectre of “Trump’s muslim ban”.
Whilst inaccurate, this description of the actual bill – which proposes to semi-criminalise non-compliance with migration enforcement and uses visa access to penalise countries who refuse to accept the removal of their citizens – is telling.
Obviously it’s telling about Amnesty, particularly amidst their recent spate of “errors”. But what’s rather more interesting is what it tells you about Australian Labor: that on the issue of migration they have been in practice (though largely not in rhetoric) more conservative than the conservatives.
Looking at the history of Australia’s recent migration policy, one thing that stands out is that if Boris Johnson was the midwife of the Rwanda policy, then its mother was the Australian Labor Party, and its father was former Kevin Rudd, the former prime minister. Indeed at the de facto kick-off to his re-election campaign in 2013 Rudd, alongside Peter O’Neill, then prime minister of Papua New Guinea, announced the expansion of a program that Rudd had previously dismantled in 2008: offshore processing of asylum seekers.
But what made the program unique to the prior Liberal government’s ‘Pacific Solution’, which his Labor rival Julia Gillard had essentially restarted in 2012, was Rudd’s commitment that “from now on any asylum seeker who arrives in Australia by boat will have no chance of being settled in Australia”.
The prior policy then had evolved from offshore processing to a total boat ban, with successful applicants being resettled in Papua New Guinea and the unsuccessful sent home. Tony Abbott’s much-discussed policy that replaced it, Operation Sovereign Borders, then was less a replacement of Labor’s policy than a continuation, with an additional (and much more controversial) pushback option.
Social democratic and labour parties working to reduce migration, particularly illegal, is not unique to Australia, even if it seems strange from the perspective of 21st-century Britain.
In Denmark the so-called ‘consensual closing’ has been spearheaded politically by the Social Democrats, even if led rhetorically by their cadre of right-populist parties in the form of the Danish People’s Party, Danish Democrats, and now the Liberal Alliance.
The policies that comprise this strategy? Amongst others: a parallel societies law that is breaking up “vulnerable residential areas” (what used to be called ghettos); the copying of Britain’s Rwanda policy; a handshake law requiring an opposite-sex handshake to obtain citizenship; raising the age minimum for family reunification through marriage; and replacing laws aimed at integrating refugees with laws aimed at encouraging their return.
Even in terms of rhetoric Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s Social Democrat prime minister, has taken positions that would make Suella Braverman and Nigel Farage blush, calling for a “zero asylum seeker” policy.
What is perhaps most interesting about this trend is how political parties have increasingly embraced not only so-called welfare chauvinism (i.e. the idea that the domestic welfare state needs to be jealously guarded, most perfectly summarised in the Sweden Democrats 2010 advert depicting the elderly walking-stick-in-hand competing with burqa-clad ‘invandrings’) but what could best be termed liberal chauvinism.
This is the spirit encapsulated in the Danish People’s Party’s advert that says “Tired of homos? Of unbelievers? Do you hate pork? And equal rights? Do you want another wife? Then go home.” It’s what a recent LSE article termed “homo-nativism”; that is to say, opposing immigration on the grounds of it undermining the kind of socially-liberal western values that large majorities of the public now support.
In Australia specifically Malcolm Turnbull, a former Liberal prime minister, underlined this logic in 2017, when he argued that, when discussing the results of their gay marriage referendum: “The numbers speak for themselves, and you can see the biggest No votes were in electorates with a large migrant population, and in particular with a large Muslim population, like several of the seats in western Sydney.”
And, much to the future chagrin of #FBPE, you find this same ‘homo-nativistic’ trend repeated in their favorite European countries.
Progressive Belgium? Even their Green Parties voted to ban the burqa on the grounds of secularism; in Brussels, heart of the EU, the Flemish Greens proposed a ban on no-stun halal slaughter on the grounds of animal protection. France? Manuel Valls, a former Socialist prime minister, was a leading figure in opposing the ‘burkini’, describing it in 2016 as incompatible with French values.
As for Germany’s famed ‘willkommenskultur’? Its undertaker has been Olaf Scholz, the Social Democrat chancellor.
Maybe most surprisingly to those not paying attention, the much-lauded Netherlands has been the crucible of this politic. Geert Wilders, post-election victory and now riding high on a third of the vote, has a long history engaging in ‘homo nativism’, having argued that “the freedoms that gays should have – to kiss, marry, have children – is exactly what Islam is fighting against”.
Importantly, the country’s whole modern right-populist movement was born out of that ideology. It was Pim Fortuyn, gay, ex-Marxist sociology professor, who argued that Dutch social progress, particularly in the field of minority rights, was fundamentally incompatible with Islam, who first delivered a populist breakthrough all the way back in 2002.
Had he not been assassinated by a far-left terrorist the week before that election, he would surely be better known. But his legacy is undeniable.
To those steeped in our progressive/conservative divide, all this might seem strange. But by bridging the gap between two solid consensuses amongst western electorates – in favour of liberal values and state spending, and against mass immigration – it could provide the foundations for a powerful new consensus.
As Chantal Mouffe argued her work, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, public policy is downstream not merely of election results but of what she called “discursive hegemony”. In plain English, she meant that winning means not just winning an election, but forging a consensus around a new settlement.
That was Margaret Thatcher’s real accomplishment in the 1980s: even when Labour returned to office, it accepted the fundamental changes she had wrought to Britain’s economic settlement. In places like Denmark, ‘welfare chauvinism’ and ‘homo nativism’ are having the same effect, uniting social democrats and right-populists.
In short, Priti Patel’s ultimate victory won’t be merely if Australia-style Rwanda flights ever take off. It will be if Labour sends them.
The post Alexander Bowen: How ‘welfare chauvinism’ and ‘homo-nativism’ are uniting European populists and social democrats appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Alexander Bowen
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