Enemies of the nation state must be resisted

The battle between left and right used to be fought on the grounds of class and the role of the state, but the battleground has shifted. The fight is now about culture and whether the state should exist at all.

Like most warfare, the culture wars are a mixture of tedium, absurdity and viciousness. At some point a consensus will emerge. Let us hope that free speech and jokes will triumph over self-censorship induced by humourless outrage.

However, the battle between those who support nation states and those who want to abolish them is, if anything, even more fundamental. On one side are those who see nation states as the only practical vehicles for effective representative systems in a rapidly changing world. On the other is a powerful coalition whose dislike of the nation state overcomes its members’ many, often substantial, political differences.

The members of this coalition are a heterodox lot. For the moment, they include the heirs of Jean Monnet. These Europhiles would be perfectly happy to replace the existing nations states of the EU with a new state. They would be content for this new polity to erect tariff and non-tariff barriers against imports, introduce fiscal transfers from its rich to its poor regions and conduct its own foreign and defence policy.

They are not all convinced that mass immigration from outside the EU is desirable, but all of them support the free movement of peoples within their own borders. To this extent they are at best only temporary members of the coalition and are rejected by potential allies like Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, in the Labour party, and France’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who see that, if the Europhiles succeed in their ambitions, Europe could block their own reactionary Socialist vision for the future.

Nevertheless, the EU performs a useful role for those who want to abolish the traditional European nation states: it gradually reduces their sovereignty and thereby undermines the effectiveness and therefore the reputation and credibility of their national institutions.

The other members of the coalition are the international socialists who want to establish world government in one form or another. One of their lead organisations is the Progressive Alliance of European Socialists. Its membership is, however, not confined to Europeans: the Australian Labor Party for instance, has joined. The Progressive Alliance produced a report in 2017 called “Shaping Our Future” which rejected “policies that put national interests first.” The Alliance strongly advocates high taxes and reactionary Socialist policies.

One of the poster boys of such people is the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Gutierrez, a former President of the Socialist International(SI). At the SI’s 22nd Congress, Guterres declared: “The goal of the SI must be to parliamenterise the global political system.” (As well as being the enemy of the nation state, he is clearly also the enemy of the English language.)

The Progressive Alliance and their rivals in the SI advocate mass immigration as one of their main weapons against the nation state. Guterres agrees with them. He has described the current Australian immigration policy as “a kind of collective sociological and psychological question.” (It sounds as though he disapproves of it.)

He and the Progressive Alliance must be pleased with their friends in the Australian Labor Party who have just combined with some independents in the Australian Parliament to overturn what has been a successful bipartisan policy. Introduced by the then Prime Minister, John Howard, it has virtually stopped illegal immigration and saved thousands from drowning as they bypassed other less alluring destinations in their attempt to enter the lucky country.

Given Guterres’s views, it is hardly surprising that the Progressive Alliance advised socialist parties to “make every effort to provide political, financial and personnel support for the…Secretary-General.”

It is not only the Secretary-General who is a useful ally. Other UN agencies are proving helpful, too. The World Health Organisation has demanded equal access to health services and social security for all migrants and condemned any resistance to illegal migration into Europe as “xenophobia”.

In this they are helped by the increasingly aggressive stance of parts of the medical profession. Medecins Sans Frontieres is delighted by the Australian Labor Party’s victory. Meanwhile, some Australian doctors have been prominent in supporting the proposal that a certificate by  two of their number should be enough to transfer would be immigrants to Australia for treatment, even though they would be jumping the queue in Australian hospitals.

The advocates of mass immigration and the equally socialist culture warriors are often the same people. Like most people on the left, they never doubt for a moment that their views are unchallengeable because they consider their views to be morally right. Anyone who opposes them is therefore evil. This conviction justifies their insults and their outrage. Above all, it underpins their infinite capacity to ignore the beam in their own eye: that like all socialist wishful thinking their ideas not only do not work, they kill people, often in large numbers. But that’s justifiable if the final outcome is a socialist nirvana.

John Howard’s policy has saved many more lives than it has cost and greatly added to the sum of human happiness. His successor, Scott Morrison saw the policy overturned by Bill Shorten, the Opposition Leader, and his allies. The Progressive Alliance, Senor Guterres and the WHO will cheer the result, secure in their conviction that, whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, they are morally right and that therefore by definition their opponents are morally wrong.

The rest of us, meanwhile, who welcome some immigration, so long as it is legal and its rules have been approved by our sovereign Parliament, must summon up our courage. In Britain, the BBC and other forums for public debate are far too easily bullied into accepting the Progressive Alliance’s definition of what is moral, excluding others with a different view as “unacceptable”, an overused word which should be a trigger-warning to the open-minded.

They thereby stifle debate and the electorates in the UK and elsewhere, who are not the fools the Progressive Alliance takes them for, note the feebleness of the Establishment in defending its own principles. So, they increasingly vote for sometimes iffy populist parties instead.

Lord Salisbury is chairman of Reaction.