All parties struggle to invest local elections with meaning, because no party can alter the consequences of what is coming up to two decades of austerity. They can promise they\u2019ll work hard for local people, and many of them will, but they can\u2019t change the maths of inadequate funding and soaring social care costs. All they can do is hope to exist in an affluent enough area.<\/p>\n
Instead, the results are taken as a popularity contest, which \u2013 if things go your way \u2013 will hopefully supply enough buoyancy to last into a general election, and, if things don\u2019t, will hopefully evaporate.<\/p>\n
In other words, these are ideal conditions for party leaders to say ridiculous things, but there\u2019s no caveat for the unbridled nastiness that came out of Reform at the weekend. It promises to deport thousands of illegal immigrants (no change there) via locked detention centres (some change there, in the direction of \u201cwarehouseification\u201d, borrowed from Donald Trump). The kicker is, these detention centres will never be situated in areas that voted Reform, but will instead be placed in Green-leaning boroughs. Zia Yusuf, Reform\u2019s spokesperson for home affairs, unveiled the policy with a handy tactical mapper, votegreengetillegals.com<\/a>, where you can put your postcode in and see how likely your area is to vote Green and get a detention centre. It\u2019s basically London, Brighton, Bristol and the Cotswolds, hosting as many thousands of migrants as this hypothetical Reform government can sweep up \u2013 so good luck with the real estate, guys.<\/p>\n As psephologists scratch around for the antonym of \u201cpork-barrel politics\u201d (\u201cgrotesque parody of politics\u201d, maybe?), it\u2019s interesting to consider who this policy is for.<\/p>\n It definitely will not deter Green voters, for whom the fear will not be a detention centre on their doorstep, but the existence of such detention centres, and the likely poor conditions within them, from a party that can\u2019t organise a hanging basket, as well as the broader vindictiveness of Reform as a force in politics, will create a fresh determination to vanquish it. It is optimistic and a bit early-21st century of Farage\u2019s party to assume that the Greens only command support in limited, metropolitan elite sort of areas, and therefore galvanising them is risk-free. But don\u2019t interrupt your enemy while he\u2019s making a mistake and all that.<\/p>\n If the announcement has an effect on the Labour<\/a> party, it\u2019s more likely to go Reform\u2019s way. On the form of the past two years, Labour will be scrambling to meet voters\u2019 legitimate concerns, vis-a-vis giant warehouses full of humans, drawing up plans for detention centres of its own, with elaborate PFI funding structures, fairly distributed between all the counties, so long as they are the cheapest. If this can spur the kind of craven copycat back-of-the-envelope far-right mimicry for which Labour is now fabled, there\u2019s a chance that it will obliterate its activist base altogether.<\/p>\n The true message is to Reform\u2019s own voters, though. Pointless, you might think. Why would they mind where the detention centres are, so long as they get built? If they spring up in Reform-voting areas, all the more convenient for a spontaneous protest. But the practicals are secondary. We\u2019re not watching a blueprint for the actual detention of real-life people, but rather a \u201clibidinal assemblage\u201d, the summoning of strong emotions \u2013 vitriol, competition, resentment \u2013 that can then be used to shape behaviour. I\u2019d only ever heard of libidinal assemblage on podcasts about fascism<\/a>, rather than from its source philosophers (Deleuze and Guattari), and I thought, \u201cHuh, that\u2019s interesting. I wonder what it actually looks like?\u201d, but it was already all around \u2013 a relentless fixation on migrants, how they should never belong, never relax, never consider themselves safe from the threat of deportation. What\u2019s it all for? How does it create prosperity, unity, optimism? It doesn\u2019t, because it\u2019s not supposed to. It\u2019s there for that little spurt of atavistic rage that will make you do a dumb thing, such as vote for the interests of capital, masquerading as the voice of the common man. The nastiness is the product, not the by-product.<\/p>\n Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"All parties struggle to invest local elections with meaning, because no party can alter the consequences of what…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":565858,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-565857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}