In the face of bitter resistance, all sorts of human rights advances have been gained. It’s worth remembering during these dark times, writes Jim Hunter.
Embroidered on a rug in Barack Obama’s White House, and referenced regularly in the then US president’s speeches, was a remark made by Martin Luther King.
“The arc of the moral universe is long,” said that leading civil rights campaigner, “but it bends towards justice.”
What King meant, or so Obama contended, is that, however harsh things are, however hard it is to envisage betterment, such betterment will one day be secured. And, whether in the US or the UK, it isn’t difficult – especially if you take a centuries-long view – to find apparent proof of that contention.
In the face of frequently bitter resistance, all sorts of human rights advances – from the abolition of slavery to ending the legalised persecution of gay people and other minorities – have been gained.
But, if it’s been tempting to assume that history does indeed bend towards justice and that – despite setbacks and reversals – progress is, in the end, assured, optimism on this score (in Britain, anyway) is getting ever tougher to sustain.
In part, that’s due to our growing sense of living in a country that’s falling apart. A country where basic services – healthcare, public transport, mail and much else – no longer work as they once did.
But aggravating the malaise, and making it harder and harder to believe that hard-won rights will be maintained, is a growing tendency on the part of ruling politicians to revert to harshness of a sort long thought to have been eradicated from our public life.
Reviving criminal transportation for the 21st century
It’s indicative of this new climate that, in influential quarters, an immediate response to strike action, whether on railways or in hospitals, is to look for ways to make it more difficult, and preferably impossible, for working people – however underpaid and however hard-pressed – to withdraw their labour.
To limit or even to revoke the right to strike would be to revert to the way Britain was run in Victorian and earlier times.
But no such reversion can be ruled out. The UK Government, after all, is already committed to reviving a criminal sanction last employed more than 150 years ago – one given up, moreover, because its cruelties far outweighed its deterrent effect.
This sanction, known as transportation, was intended to cleanse Britain of all sorts of supposed undesirables, from burglars to political dissenters. And it did.
Between 1615 and 1868, when transportation ceased, more than 200,000 men and women who’d fallen foul of authority were shipped to the country’s overseas possessions – mostly to Maryland or Virginia in the first instance, and then, following these and other American colonies winning their war of independence, to Australia.
Now, transportation is firmly back on the UK agenda – as a means, or so it’s asserted, of dealing with the many aspiring migrants and asylum seekers landing regularly on England’s south coast.
If as many as possible of these unfortunates are promptly got rid of by flying them to some modern equivalent of the penal settlements long ago established in Australian locations like Botany Bay, it’s argued, then others will be put off coming here in the first place.
Suella Braverman’s ‘dream’ is doomed to fail
British colonies now being in short supply, and our few remaining overseas territories, like Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, having been ruled out on cost and other grounds, today’s transportation enthusiasts – Home Secretary Suella Braverman prominent among them – appear to have found a new Botany Bay in Rwanda, whose ruling regime, in return for a £140 million upfront payment, has agreed to accommodate our unwanted migrants.
Sending thousands of thieves and poachers to Botany Bay never did much to eliminate theft or poaching
In one of the more extraordinary ministerial speeches of recent times, Ms Braverman told last year’s Conservative Party conference that to have planeloads of these often vulnerable people dispatched to Rwanda is her “obsession” and her “dream”.
Now that England’s High Court has ruled her Rwanda project lawful, the home secretary’s dream might be closer to realisation. Whether its implementation will prevent or even slow down allegedly illegal crossings of the English Channel is more dubious.
Sending thousands of thieves and poachers to Botany Bay never did much to eliminate theft or poaching. Nor was the drive for political reform halted by the transportation of pro-democracy activists like the Scottish lawyer Thomas Muir – whose crime in the UK of the 1790s was to press for extensions to the then extremely limited right to vote.
It was his firm belief, Muir told the court that consigned him to Australia, that he “had engaged in a good, a just and a glorious cause – a cause which sooner or later must and will prevail”. He was right.
As a means of fending off democracy, transportation failed just as comprehensively as it failed to stamp out crime. Suella Braverman’s dreams and obsessions notwithstanding, it’s equally unlikely to stop refugees and migrants risking all to reach our shores.
Jim Hunter is a historian, award-winning author and Emeritus Professor of History at the University of the Highlands and Islands
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