Rishi Sunak is in thrall to just two syllables: small boats. Plunging wages, extortionate heating bills, collapsing public services – such trivia does not detain the UK’s first Goldman Sachs prime minister from his Peloton. But small boats crossing the Channel? These he will vow to stop, fulminating in speeches, plastering the words across his lectern as if in a deadly pandemic.
To pull it off, he is yet again this week burning through his dwindling political capital, just like those tech venture capitalists he adores. So he’s declaring Rwanda safe for refugees – which, according to our supreme court, is like claiming black is white – while handing Rwanda hundreds of millions of pounds (its president was yesterday promising a refund). Our chief lawmaker promised this week to break international law and to strip asylum seekers of court protection – or, as he termed it, “the legal merry-go-round”.
Denying the wronged their rights is how the British establishment created the Post Office scandal – but no matter! Nothing is too bad for those fleeing broken countries and risking their lives to come here. Team Sunak tells us it is “illegal immigration”, even though government statistics show three out of four asylum seekers win refugee status or some other legal protection. Tories claim that foreigners steal Britons’ social housing, even though the biggest culprit for that is their own handbag-wielding deity, Margaret Thatcher, whose right-to-buy scheme stripped England of more than 2 million council houses.
Over the past half-decade, the government has manufactured a full-blown moral panic over refugees. First the Conservatives denied most of them any safe route to seek asylum here, while starving the asylum system of funds so that it collapsed into chaos. Finally, they and their media allies portrayed some of the poorest and most desperate people in the world as dusk-skinned folk devils bringing their foreign religions and culture here in order to take the UK for all it’s got, and trash society along the way.
This strategy will almost certainly not save Tory MPs from electoral annihilation – but in some places, such as the south Wales town of Llanelli, it is sowing hate, driving former Labour voters towards the far right and poisoning the civic soil. Sunak is constructing this moral panic because he hasn’t much else to offer, apart from a few billions in tax cuts. Nothing to bring down NHS waiting lists, or to rebuild schools made of crumbly concrete.
Yet imagine for a moment that Sunak and the other leaders across Europe who have pandered to anti-refugee sentiment were to set their sights on another seafaring target. Imagine they directed their ire at plutocrats’ yachts.
No Westminster peroration or Mail column is ever dedicated to yachts, but scan the real bad-news stories – the ones about big-money sleaze or dodgy party donations – and one will be there. What will be the lasting image of the PPE scandal? Michelle Mone on the deck of a luxury boat. What have Mone and her husband got planned for their next epic holiday? According to the papers this week, it’s splashing out on a £50m yacht and sailing around the world.
The former immigration minister and full-time spiritual blancmange Robert Jenrick suggested this week that new arrivals threatened British “generosity”, as they violated “national identity – bound by shared memories, traditions and values”; yet I can think of few greater threats to public generosity or shared values than a pair of chancers exploiting their ministerial contacts to profiteer amid a pandemic.
In the plutocratic era, it’s not muck that’s the problem, it’s murk – and where there’s murk, there’s gleaming brass. What was the tell for any of Vladimir Putin’s robber barons? A whacking great yacht. What binds together the billionaires skiing in Davos this week? The yacht market. George Osborne, Peter Mandelson, Tony Blair, Barack Obama: you can’t keep a good centrist off the things.
You’ve seen plenty of the dinghies that young men, women and children clamber aboard to get to Kent, but you may never have seen a superyacht. Most of what you need to know about them is that there are more of them than ever before, that the largest outsize a Royal Navy destroyer, and that they are getting bigger all the time.
In his forthcoming book, Superyachts: Luxury, Tranquility and Ecocide, Grégory Salle calculates there were 1,835 superyachts measuring 30 metres or more at the start of the century; within two decades that was over 5,200. Each new one boasts more luxuries than the last: Imax cinema rooms, swimming pools on deck that can be turned into dancefloors, and shower heads the size of car bonnets that pour forth champagne. (“The only unresolved question,” says a designer, “is whether the champagne should be warm or cold.”)
Such boats are typically gigantic floating tax havens, operating in international waters and run on behalf of unidentifiable owners by management companies that are registered in the Caymans, say, or the British Virgin Islands. They operate with impunity: a couple of years ago, the city of Rotterdam was all set to dismantle an entire bridge to let a yacht for Jeff Bezos pass out on to the open sea. Only public outcry stopped that happening.
Their owners have the cash to buy themselves four, five passports – because when you are very rich you can get citizenship to the UK or elsewhere in return for a big enough contribution to its exchequer. More than 100 years ago, GK Chesterton wrote in The Man Who Was Thursday: “The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht.” That truth endures.
Salle notes that superyachts dump toxic waste at sea and burn through tens or hundreds of thousands of tonnes of dirty diesel. If the climate crisis is partly a crisis of the very richest burning ridiculous amounts of carbon, then analysts believe yachts are the single biggest part of a billionaire’s carbon footprint – far more than private jet flights.
Superyachts may be a fringe hobby pursued by those with hundreds of millions to burn. But “small boats” are also a tiny fraction of a far bigger immigration picture in the UK, where an ageing population needs care workers and NHS medics. But put the two boats together in the same picture and you get a larger perspective on the arguments of the nativist right. Sunak, Jenrick and their like accuse migrants of wanting British citizenship without earning it. Yet those Afghans and Iraqis arriving here want only to build a life, to get jobs, raise families. The billionaires, on the other hand, can buy the protection of this state or many others – and opt out of the other obligations. So why does the Silicon Valley wannabe in No 10 direct so much ire at asylum seekers? Perhaps because some boats, and some lives, are more equal than others.
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
