Senior government ministers including Amber Rudd and Jeremy Hunt are damaging the UK’s standing in the world with their divisive rhetoric, the chair of the Commons Brexit committee, Hilary Benn, has said.
The former shadow foreign secretary said the Conservative party’s annual conference was an “absolute disaster” because senior politicians portrayed an image of the UK that was insular and aggressive towards foreigners.
Indicating that such language could influence negotiations with the EU, Benn said making pronouncements about what the government would achieve from its discussions would harden attitudes towards the UK among European politicians and officials.
Speaking at the Institute for Government’s headquarters in central London, Benn said: “When I reflect upon a certain week in Birmingham in the autumn, where people of a particular political party gathered and made speeches, I thought that was a disastrous week for Britain’s reputation in the world. Absolutely disastrous.
“Because to produce headlines saying ‘Crackdown on foreign students’ – when I last checked I wasn’t aware that foreign students were a problem that we need to crack down upon, it is ridiculous to have them in the net migration target – or saying that doctors who have brought their skills to this country can stay in the interim while we train more of our own doctors – it sent a message at that point that we are closing in on ourselves as a nation. That’s not who we are, it is not what Britain is. We will thrive in the future by being a welcoming country.”
He said ministers should stop claiming they would achieve certain goals from the Brexit negotiations before they began because it would only harden the opinions of those with whom Britain was negotiating.
“The second difficulty has been people sitting there saying: ‘We are going to get the following’. Well, the 27 [other EU member states] are thinking: ‘We will see about that’ … It would be prudent to change the tone,” he said.
In October, Rudd, the home secretary, told the party conference that the Home Office would shortly consult on the new student immigration system, and on tightening the resident labour market test that companies have to pass before recruiting employees from overseas. The moves were part of the drive to reduce net migration, which currently stands at 327,000, to “sustainable levels”.
“The test should ensure people coming here are filling gaps in the labour market, not taking jobs British people could do,” she said.
Hunt, the health secretary, told delegates he would recruit more UK-trained doctors to replace those who were being employed from abroad. “Is it right to import doctors from poorer countries that need them, while turning away bright home graduates desperate to study medicine?” he asked.
Benn said that while politicians should take on board the views of many Britons who wished to see curbs in migration, immigration targets were unhelpful because migrant labour was still needed in many sectors, including agriculture and social care.
He said he had seen first-hand the vital work migrants do as he nursed his father, the Labour veteran Tony Benn, who died in March 2014.
“When my father was dying, almost all who helped care for him were born outside of the UK. Who will look after us in the future?” he said.
There are lots of words used to describe people such as me. Medics and their allies will use some Latin or Greek to make their language appear authoritative and scientific. According to them I am obese, or someone requiring bariatric intervention. By extension, in newspapers I am part of an anonymous population blob known as “the obese”.
If I go shopping for clothes I might be called plus size. If I meet someone who finds someone with a body like mine shameful, I might be euphemistically described as big or large. Others might try to spin this shame into something more positive and pretty, like curvy. If someone tries to translate my work, they might use words such as gordo, dicke, grasso, grande. In some places there might not be words for me, either because no language exists, or because some people relate to me through a lexicon of disapproving looks and disgusted sounds.
I like to call myself, and be called, fat. This is simple and descriptive and it feels powerful to reclaim a word that is frequently used pejoratively. I am a fat activist, which is a term that can mean many things, but for me it means that I think fat is a political subject.
Fat is typically framed as a health problem but health is not apolitical, as bodies of work in the social sciences have come to reveal. Debates about the NHS, and fat people being held responsible for funding crises, are just one area in which fat is a political subject. The social hatred and scapegoating of fat people can also be seen as political.
In my most recent book, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement, I argue that fat activism can be anything done by anyone for any reason. It is not necessarily about self-acceptance, improving health, developing self-love or addressing stigma – though that can be part of it. It can be as much about joining organisations as tweeting; as going to a fat clothes-swap as writing and sharing a poem; as having a conversation with someone as presenting a paper at a conference. It can be weird, illegible, ambiguous and antisocial. There is no singular way of being a fat activist.
I think the experience of being fat is valuable. This is heresy to those who think fat people should not exist
In calling myself fat I am drawing on a feminist practice of naming things in order to bring them into being. This means naming myself, on my own terms, and using language to define the world around me as I experience it. I do this because I think the experience of being fat is valuable. This is heresy to those who think fat people should not exist. But the view from the margins illuminates a lot about the shadow side of conformity, norms, and fears concerning embodiment and difference, and how these are manipulated for power and profit.
Earlier this year I published a homemade dictionary of fat activist words and concepts. I wanted to subvert the language of medicine and public health to give readers a playful glimpse of a subculture. Here are some examples.
Alliteration
A literary device that is irresistible to people writing about fat, especially journalists: piling on the pounds, fat fighters, weight watchers, and so on. Maybe they do this because fat is intrinsically funny to write about, not like serious stories or hard news.
Belly
The part of your body that’s under your tits and above your privates. Can be any size, shape, texture, colour, levels of hairiness, sweatiness. A place where fat accumulates on some people. Sometimes flops around, sometimes is bold and stout. Sometimes makes gurgling noises. Sometimes has creases and stretch marks. Sometimes has a mind of its own and will not behave. A delightful, gorgeous thing, a source of physical power much maligned and fretted over. Important resource in gut-barging competitions.
Calorie
A way of talking about energy that you get through eating food. An obsession. A pretty name for a girl child.
Fathlete
A fat athlete.
Thin
A person who is not fat. A person who is better-looking, healthier, more intelligent, more likely to succeed in life, sexier, more lovable and better to be with than any fat person. A very good and virtuous and normal person.
Wings
Fat upper arms that get more wobbly and loose with age. Source of power.
I created A Fat Activist Vernacular because I am interested in language and power in relation to fat people. The weight-loss industry is worth a fortune, and there is a lot of money and status riding on the question of who gets to define fat experience – generally public health politicians and their friends and allies in the weight-loss industry and medicine. My preference would be that this is a subject for fat people to work out for ourselves by valuing and sharing our own experiences. But there are many others with vested interests in owning and wielding this information.
The language of fat activism, frequently raw and emotive when people talk about being objects of hate, is being appropriated and gentrified by academics and professionals, tidied up and made respectable, while ousting the originators. You can see this in the transformation of the activist term fatphobia into the blandly inoffensive “weight bias”, which is sure to make its way into policy sometime soon.
My own term, “headless fatty” – referring to media images of fat people whose heads have been cropped out of the frame – was also cleaned up by a prominent academic at Yale as “headless stomach”. What happens more often is that fat activist originators of language and concepts are not cited, and their ideas become appropriated and made respectable without anyone being the wiser.
Meanwhile, at the age of 46, I have found other ways of speaking about this subject. After embarking a few years ago on a lifelong ambition of becoming a contemporary dancer, in November I will be dancing a piece called But Is it Healthy? in the Wellcome Collection’s Obesity gallery. I get asked the question all the time and it is impossible to answer it in words, not least because fat people are a diverse group, health is constructed in myriad ways, and expert science is not incontrovertible. So I will dance the answer instead! This will be performed as a duet by Kay Hyatt and me to a soundtrack I have made based on archival recordings by fat feminist activists made in 1980 by Karen Stimson at the New Haven Fat Women’s Health Conference. The speakers are Diane Denne, Judy Freespirit, Aldebaran and Judith Stein; a recording of Marcia Duvall, also present on the panel, has unfortunately been lost. These women are founders of many of the ideas circulating in fat activism today, but they have been neglected historically. I would love more people to know about their work.
The dance emerged from a period of research in which Hyatt and I explored what it is like to be continually asked: “But is it healthy?”; it brings together years of activism, explaining, patient listening and deep frustration in response to this question.
Through dance I am developing a different kind of language, using my body expressively and encountering audiences who have been worn down by the rhetoric of the obesity epidemic for the past decade and a half, and want something different.
I hope that by watching us dance in the Obesity display at the Wellcome Collection, audiences will understand that there are other ways of talking and thinking about fat than those which have been dominant in recent years. It is unbelievable that fat people like me have to lobby so very hard to be seen simply as human. I hope the dancing, and its soundtrack, helps people recognise that fat people have community, histories, cultures, agency, thoughts and lives all of our own.
• Charlotte Cooper and Kay Hyatt are performing on 4 November 2016 as part of the Friday Late Spectacular: Body Language at the Wellcome Collection
A woman smoking an electronic cigarette. Photograph: Rex Characteristics
E-cigarettes are either going to save hundreds of thousands of lives by helping folks to quit smoking or they are going to destroy millions of lives by luring youngsters and younger folks into the habit. It is extremely challenging for the onlooker to know what to feel, when the rhetoric is flying in the two directions from very eminent folks who all have a passionate commitment to public overall health.
The most current letter to Margaret Chan, director basic of the Planet Well being Organisation, swings the pendulum firmly back to the place of the opponents of a cost-free industry in e-cigarettes. The language is challenging and uncompromising. It is signed by these who concern, primarily based on decades of proof of negative behaviour, that the tobacco companies are obtaining concerned in the nicotine delivery units in buy to undermine bans on cigarette marketing and smoking in public locations.
The letter is a response to a single from 53 scientists to Chan, sent on 3 June, which stated in no less direct language that treating e-cigarettes like tobacco would deprive smokers of a new and increasingly popular way to quit. E-cigarettes, the scientists say, are a really useful harm reduction instrument, permitting smokers to get their nicotine resolve without having the deadly tar in cigarettes. Amongst these who signed the earlier letter have been Professor Gerry Stimson, of Imperial University, who has been at the forefront of harm reduction advocacy in medication the former government drugs adviser David Nutt and Michel Kazatchkine, ex-head of the Global Fund, whose primary interest is HIV.
The opposing letter has twice the amount of signatories, from all over the planet. They fear a comeback by Massive Tobacco, which is turning into the most significant player in the e-cigarette industry. They do not think claims that the market wants to diversify. E-cigarettes could demonstrate to be a rewarding market place, but globally tobacco is massive, and increasing in the developing world. Why would Huge Tobacco support e-cigarettes if they are probably to shrink that market, the opponents inquire.
The WHO has been moving in their direction. Some smaller European countries, this kind of as Slovenia, have been asking for suggestions, and there are stories of e-cigarette shops opening outside colleges. In October, the WHO will meet to go over no matter whether to carry e-cigarettes into the framework convention on tobacco control, a single of the proudest achievements of the WHO, despite the fact that the guy who played the lead role in its improvement whilst at the WHO, Derek Yach, now of the Vitality Institute in New York, is 1 of the 53 signatories opposing that.
There are imagined to be two million men and women employing e-cigarettes in the Uk, and a lot of of them say they have managed to cease smoking as a result. A lot of argue passionately that they have been rescued from harm and that everyone must have a correct to use them if they want to. Powerful feelings have led to outbursts of anger and even vitriol on Twitter, and some public health medical doctors say they have been threatened. That has increased their personal conviction that malign forces – in the form of the tobacco business – should be pulling the strings.
In the end, only very good scientific proof will persuade the critics of e-cigarettes that they are not a danger. The studies that have been carried out, this kind of as a recent a single by Professor Robert West, from University College London, which showed that e-cigarettes had been far more effective than nicotine substitute treatment in helping people quit smoking, are not ample, opponents say. Their argument is that, till we know, we ought to opt to be secure rather than sorry.
By Josh Archambault, Jonathan Ingram and Christie Herrera—Mr. Archambault and Ms. Herrera are Senior Fellows, and Mr. Ingram Director of Research, at the Basis for Government Accountability.
Final Monday, Indiana Governor Mike Pence unveiled his so-referred to as “conservative” situation for ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Pence’s program, dubbed the “Healthy Indiana Strategy two.0” or “HIP 2.,” expands Medicaid to ObamaCare amounts with so-referred to as “POWER Accounts” that are funded by taxpayers and employed by growth enrollees to spend for care.
The media exalted the Pence announcement and characterized it as the most current red state to cave to ObamaCare. Indeed, some progressives say Kathleen Sebelius’ best achievement as Wellness and Human Companies Secretary was obtaining Republican governors to increase Medicaid.
But at AEI, Pence was singing a distinct tune—he argued that he wasn’t caving into ObamaCare at all.
I’ve mentioned it ahead of and I’ll say it yet again — Obamacare must be repealed
Pence explained, (falsely) claiming his program does not implement ObamaCare but as an alternative
aids make the situation for why repeal is essential.
Even though a lot of on the proper have roundly denounced the Pence strategy as an ObamaCare Medicaid expansion, you will hear equivalent free-market rhetoric from the handful of conservatives who have tepidly come to Pence’s defense.
In spite of people supporters’ rhetoric, the Pence plan—just like similarly disguised strategies out of Arkansas and Iowa—remains an ObamaCare Medicaid expansion in disguise.
Rhetoric: The Pence plan functions as a block grant.
Reality: Pence’s Medicaid expansion is structured and funded like any other open-ended government plan.
Pence informed the AEI crowd that his plan “is not intended to be an entitlement” and “will serve as a model for what block-granted Medicaid packages could be in states across the country.”
Like the Arkansas Personal Selection, nevertheless, the Pence plan is a far cry from real block grants that conservatives have lengthy-championed.
By definition, Medicaid block grants give states a fixed, lump sum of federal dollars in exchange for broad autonomy in providing Medicaid benefits. Pence’s prepare functions neither of these elements. Below Pence’s ObamaCare expasion, Indiana will draw down rising quantities of ObamaCare in exchange for including much more individuals to the Medicaid rolls.
And as we pointed out previously, the Pence program delivers ObamaCare Medicaid positive aspects, with ObamaCare Medicaid expense-sharing, to the ObamaCare Medicaid growth population. It is the worst of all worlds for taxpayers—Indiana’s Medicaid growth beneath Pence’s plan will be a blank examine with no real incentive or versatility to manage charges.
Rhetoric: Power Accounts build on Indiana’s success with Wellness Savings Accounts (HSAs).
Reality: Electrical power Accounts below Pence’s Medicaid expansion are nothing at all like HSAs.
Dan Perrin at the HSA Coalition praises Pence’s plan as “expanding HSA-like ideas … into locations they must go to turn into broadly utilized and accepted.”
But as we mentioned previously, Energy Accounts underneath Pence’s ObamaCare expansion are a pale imitation of the accounts produced by Gov. Mitch Daniels’ authentic iteration of Healthier Indiana, and they search absolutely nothing like the HSAs that 96% of Indiana state staff have these days.
