Luxury Beliefs

Ben Wildsmith

‘Luxury beliefs’ is a phrase that has recently become popular amongst right-wingers. I first heard it from former Home Secretary Suella Braverman in relation to border regulations and liberal concepts in criminal justice.

The line is that ‘elites’ cultivate ostensibly virtuous beliefs because they are protected from their consequences by wealth and privilege. So, the argument runs that it’s easy to advocate for, say, progressive sentencing if you are lucky enough to live in an area with little crime.

Immigration is, of course, easy to conflate with criminal behaviour because, by definition, a crime committed by an immigrant would not have been committed by him/her if they hadn’t been admitted to the country.

In this way, the Bravermans of the world can characterise immigrant crime as extra to indigenous crime, and thus advance immigration as causative. It’s rather like blaming the wind for the spread of flu.

In reality, the keenest proponents of progressive sentencing tend to be professionals working in the criminal justice field. Locking people up for drug-related crime, for instance, is often counterproductive to ongoing treatment – it may feel good to punish an addict for relapsing, but it won’t do anything to prevent it happening again.

Similarly, anybody involved in recruitment knows that immigration is vital to keep services and businesses running. Smearing essential workers as a necessary evil, or worse, a menace, is as fantastical in an ageing society as it is immoral.

So, how have so many arrived at the conclusion that these things are the mad indulgences of over-educated dilettantes?

The answer, I think, is that Europe, and the UK in particular, has been conforming to real luxury beliefs all our lives, and now the bills are being called in. Let’s have a look at some of these.

The service economy

I suppose if you were facing life in filthy, noisy factories then switching to a weightless economy must have seemed appealing at the end of the 1970s. If the City of London had been moved to Merthyr or Stoke on Trent maybe this experiment might have been interesting.

Instead, deindustrialised Britain has begged for the crumbs from South-East England’s table for the best part of half a century whilst our workforce deskilled and our infrastructure crumbled. Beyond the fortunes squandered on benefits, social costs have been incalculable as the social fabric that made life worth living tore to let in crime and poor health.

A true ‘luxury belief’ is that marginalising most of the population from the source of its wealth can be done without consequence. For most of the UK, the headline figures describe an economy in which we’ve never been invited to participate.

NATO protection

I see nothing extraordinary in the Trump administration’s suggestion that the USA won’t protect western Europe. The only real question is whether it ever would have done.

The fiction of American protection requires us to believe that the USA would, ultimately, risk a nuclear conflict on behalf of its allies. Looking at America’s behaviour on the world stage in our lifetimes, does that kind of existential selflessness seem in character to you?

Europe’s touching belief in this notion has left it and the UK underequipped and without unified supply chains with which to defend itself from Russia or anybody else. The bellicose posturing of the EU over Ukraine betrays a vulnerability born of decades of irresponsibility.

Democracy

Democracy is an inherently superior system. Well, it’s certainly a desirable system, but it requires stability to operate. If your democracy has waved through the systematic impoverishment of a chunk of the population by larcenous private interests who refuse even to fund your armed forces, then it becomes a weakness to exploit.

A democracy should be the expression of agency by the electorate. With inequality as stark as it is here, many voters have no agency. Resultingly, their vote becomes an implement of impotent spite against those who have disempowered them.

So, whilst we remove one government after another, and force the resignations of our leaders, a democracy-free regime like China can operate on undisturbed economic plans that span decades.

Those who characterise common decency as ‘luxury beliefs’ are attempting to preach from within a vacuum that ignores their previous dismantling of all that kept us safe. Everything is a ‘luxury’ when your birthright has been sold from under you.