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Right-wing populist NatCon message may resonate in UK [1]
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Date: 2023-05
Three apparently unconnected news items this week together throw light on long-term global trends.
First, the early months of this year were the deadliest for six years for refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean from Tunisia, to the extent that the north African country’s morgues are full to overflowing and local authorities are looking to build new cemeteries to cope.
The problem stems from the increased desperation of people, principally from other parts of Africa and the Middle East, trying to escape poverty, often exacerbated by the impact of conflicts and frequently overshadowed by the growing crisis of climate breakdown. It is made worse in Tunisia by the rhetoric of the increasingly autocratic president, Kais Saied, condemning immigration for damaging Tunisia’s social coherence and changing the country’s identity.
This is similar enough to outpourings of politicians of the right across Europe and North America – from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to Suella Braverman and Donald Trump – but in Tunisia it is directly threatening to recent immigrants, increasing pressure on them to head north whatever the dangers of the sea passage.
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Second, the Tunisian issue comes at a time when report after report points to the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority, a recent example being a report that the worldwide market for private jets is booming.
The global fleet of private jets has more than doubled in the past five years, and last year private flying exceeded its previous peak in 2007, just before the 2008-9 financial crisis. A study from the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies reports that “…approximately 1% of people are responsible for about half of all aviation carbon emissions”.
Finally, while much of England, and rather fewer parts of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are immersed in coronation hype, the authorities have quietly brought forward legislation to increase police powers to deal with protests, making preventative detention and ‘stop and search’ easier. The coronation will include the large-scale use of real-time facial recognition, with vehicle-mounted cameras able to scan thousands of faces a minute for potential miscreants.
It is a pattern being repeated in different forms in many other states, as the technology of control evolves to higher levels of efficiency.
These individual news items may seem unconnected, but they can be also seen as indicating much more profound trends. The Tunisian refugee issue stems partly from economic marginalisation, partly from consequences of war and partly from the onset of climate breakdown. The surge in private jet use is indicative of increased global economic divisions, and the tightening up of public order laws and the introduction of new technologies of surveillance and control will no doubt ensure that elite communities will continue to feel safe in thoroughly uncertain and worrying times.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/natcon-national-conservatism-tunisia-migrant-deaths/
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