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Illusions in liberalism still lie like a fog on our thinking
Just as we cannot detach colonialism or slavery from the golden age of liberalism, neither can we swallow modern-day mainstream rhetoric on rights and freedoms in the face of racist migration policies and war, writes NICK WRIGHT
DEPORTATIONS: Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has led a comeback for the Social Democrats, but under a harsher approach to immigration that has seen the focus turn from integration to repatriation

THERE is a measure of uncertainty about Rishi Sunak’s tenure at Downing Street. He is supposed to be the guarantor of fiscal responsibility and stable government. But he cannot be that sure of his footing in the parliamentary party if he has to maintain Suella Braverman in office as a sop to those he recently deposed.

There is of course, much-exaggerated liberal outrage at Braverman’s posturing, but the fact is that she is merely putting into words what are the essential features of Britain’s racist and discriminatory immigration policy, which itself is simply a different rendering of the principles which underpin the EU’s approach to the huge population shifts which are an unavoidable feature of 21st-century capitalism.

The notion of Europe as the embodiment of liberal values underpins much middle-class thinking about present-day politics. It is a famously flexible feature of the 18th and 19th-century notion of Europe a beacon of civilisation. This comes into violent conflict with reality every time a migrant child dies entering the watery frontiers of the EU in the Mediterranean.

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