Reports that the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer intends to appoint Baroness Louise Casey as a minister if he is elected, show his intentions to govern without difference in style or substance.
Apparently Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer is considering appointing the cross bench peer Dame Louise Casey of Blackstock as a Minister after his forthcoming (assumed) victory in the general election sometime this year. Casey – a champion of various administrations’ ‘British values’ agenda, has been instrumental in pushing this populism into various policy areas.
The Times calls her ‘one of Whitehall’s best-known troubleshooters’. I would describe her as a ‘fixer’. I wrote for Middle East Eye in 2016 on Casey’s review on integration, that:
“Reports and reviews like Casey’s contribute to cycles of demonisation that lead not just to a shift in values, but to the reimagining of the state, its role, and, more importantly, the policies to tackle – or not tackle – poverty, discrimination, health crises, crime, violence against women and beyond.
“By turning that punitive spotlight on deviancy, Casey inadvertently implies that the British values she speaks of are informed by or imbue that regressiveness and sit opposed to all who suffer from any of the above.”
The malefactors in the integration scenario were migrants (mainly coded as Muslims), who had lower rates of employment and social mobility. This lack was not, in Casey’s opinion, due to recorded and acknowledged discrimination, but due to Muslims’ own failures (including a lack of desire) to integrate. She used this lazy Islamophobic argument in particular to explain the lower levels of Muslim women in employment.
Whilst this Review was one replete with anti-Muslim narratives that reproduced government and certain media discourse around Islam, Muslims and (unequal) citizenship, concerns about Casey are not limited to anti-Muslim racism.
Her pedigree as a fixer goes back two decades supplying narratives in policy-speak that government requires to shift cultural expectations. Those expectations shift focus away from the rich and powerful, and the role of government in solving social problems, and onto individuals and groups portrayed as the source rather than the victims of societal discord. In addition to the above issues, her reports have helped to flip thinking on homelessness, criminal justice, anti-social behaviour and just last year, policing.
This last report is an outlier for its finding (unlike in her review into integration) that institutional racism does exist, and can be found in the police services. I completely understand why minoritized groups within the police service (wish to) use and even celebrate this. I note however, that again her review delivers to the government of the day exactly what it requires. A conflict between the Tory party and police services has been ongoing at least since Theresa May’s (then Home Secretary) excoriating speech at the Police Federation conference of 2014, where she vowed to break its power.
Casey delivered the hammer required for this government to strike its blow, just as she has helped provide the shocking terms of various narrative changes for New Labour, Con-Dem and Tory governments. In the UK, we no longer think of such issues as homelessness or anti-social behaviour as things we as a society and our government should tackle. Instead, blame is placed solely on those who are the subject of the review – rough sleepers, petty offenders, migrants, Muslims. They must be marked out and shamed in the public psyche and in some cases literally – Casey, in her 2008 review of the criminal justice system, demands that offenders be forced to wear hi vis tabards while performing community sentences, an high crime areas would be festooned with posters announcing the latest convictions.
If true, then Sir Keir’s intention to have Casey in the cabinet, is an intention of keeping the same methods of managing society and moulding and controlling (populist) narratives to fit political agendas. As things worsen for all of us, the ways of governing for the few over the many remains the same.
Arzu Merali is a writer and researcher based in London, UK. Follow her on X and Instagram @arzumerali.
Photos:
Louise Casey from No. 10, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED
Keir Starmer CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED
