Boris Johnson took a break from making £5 million (by now) from extra-curricular activities to make a rare return to his actual job – being an MP.
He revisited Parliament to attack Labour MPs for refusing to back his hare-brained scheme to send migrants to Rwanda, after they come across the Channel in boats to get to the UK.
And Home Secretary Suella Braverman joined him in calling on Labour to “back control over our borders and back the British people”.
But the plan doesn’t even have the full support of Conservatives in Parliament, as Tory Caroline Nokes made abundantly clear on the BBC’s Politics Live.
Watch her describe the whole policy as an “expensive white elephant”:
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The so-called “House of Commons hooligan” Jonathan Gullis, Tory MP for Stoke-on-Trent North since 2019, has made another of his famously misguided attacks – this time at bishops in the House of Lords.
His outburst came after all the Anglican bishops in the Upper House said the Tory government’s Rwanda deportation policy, which was endorsed as “lawful” by the High Court earlier this week, should “shame us as a nation”.
They signed a letter saying, “The shame is our own, because our Christian heritage should inspire us to treat asylum-seekers with compassion, fairness and justice, as we have for centuries.”
In fairness, even the Home Office seems to have accepted that many of those who arrive in the UK by illegal routes still have a claim for asylum; the majority of them are accepted as genuine refugees and are permitted to remain in the UK.
The problem lies in the fact that they have to take illegal routes – making them prey for the Tory government’s deportation policy – because there are no legal routes; the Tories have closed them all off in order to be able to pursue this inhumane mistreatment of people who are already victims.
Gullis’s response may be found here:
So: first he flung some whataboutery into the ether, claiming that the Church should be dealing with abuse claims against its own clergy. How does he know that it isn’t? And isn’t that more a problem for the Catholic clergy?
Then he said: “Too many people are using the pulpit to preach from.” Does he not know that preaching is exactly what the pulpit is for?
This man used to be a teacher but gave up when he was elected into Parliament. He said pupils at the school where he had been working were “probably happy to see me go” – perhaps because they were already better-educated than he was?
He also said the bishops were unelected. Correct – but everybody has an understanding of what constitutes fairness and justice, and nobody needs to be elected to put forward their opinion of what that is.
Furthermore, these are people who sit as experts on law and political matters in the Upper House of Parliament, and their words have weight whether Gullis likes it or not.
Instead of spouting ignorant nonsense, he should learn respect – not just for the bishops who have far more experience and understanding than he does, but also for the people his policies are victimising.
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Suella Braverman: this is an archive image but you can bet she’s happy now.
The Tory government’s plan to send people who have arrived in the UK by illegal means to Rwanda is lawful, and the administration acted rationally in arranging the deal with that country – according to the High Court.
Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, is treating it as a major victory, saying she will move ahead with the policy as soon as possible.
But how soon is that?
Well…
First, the courts will have to deal with any appeals against this decision. That process will begin in January.
Then, there could be a challenge to the Supreme Court, depending on whether there is concern over the interpretation of any points of law.
Furthermore, the High Court has ruled that more care needs to be taken in the judgement of each case, meaning that many candidates – if they may be described that way – for deportation to start a new life in Rwanda may be found unsuitable for it.
And finally, any who are sentenced to go may try to petition the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to have the ruling overturned.
So Braverman has been careful not to suggest that any flight will take place soon.
Meanwhile, opponents of the policy have been condemning it from all sides.
Labour’s Yvette Cooper said the policy remains “unworkable, extortionate and deeply damaging”, and “risks making trafficking worse”.
Alison Thewlis for the SNP said the police was “deeply immoral”, saying people “fleeing war, famine and oppression deserve and need our full support”.
Clare Moseley, founder of refugee charity Care4Calais, called the decision on Monday “disappointing”.
She said: “People who have suffered the horrors of war, torture and human rights abuses should not be faced with the immense trauma of deportation to a future where we cannot guarantee their safety.”
Josie Naughton, chief executive of migrant charity Choose Love, said the ruling “flies in the face of international commitments and accountability”, adding that campaigners will “continue to fight” for the “human right to seek asylum”.
James Wilson, deputy director of Detention Action, said: “We are disappointed that the High Court has found the removal of refugees to an autocratic state which tortures and kills people is lawful. However, we will fight on.
“The Rwanda policy is brutal and harmful and we will now consider an appeal against today’s judgment.”
It seems clear that the jubilation from the Tories is premature.
The Tories may be kicked out of government before this controversial policy reaches any kind of fruition at all.
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This daughter of a Kenyan family who came to the UK as refugees has spoken of her “dream” to deport her family’s fellow refugees to an internment camp in Rwanda without conducting any checks on whether they deserve to remain in the UK or not.
If you can stomach it, you might be interested in watching her speech at the Conservative Party conference earlier in the week:
She has sparked a huge amount of commentary – of course:
Professor Tim Wilson points out: “We cannot deport people until our paperwork and theirs is properly processed. And hospitality to the disadvantaged runs through our civilisation. We ignore that at our peril. Yes, there will be cheats who take advantage of our goodness but we cannot allow them- the miscreants- to dictate our behaviour and our policy! I have difficulty understanding how this policy was conceived but I cannot understand how we can be represented by someone so callous and brutal that she DREAMS of such toxic brutality?”
Here’s his video comment:
Here’s Novara Media’s take on it:
It was discussed on the BBC’s Politics Live today (October 6):
Clearly the views put forward by this Parliamentarian are abhorrent to large numbers of people on all sides of the political spectrum.
Yet Liz Truss – who has admitted that she doesn’t mind being unpopular – is determined to keep Braverman in post to push through legislation that will make this inhumane (some might say inhuman) policy workable.
Truss also reversed her policy to scrap the 45p top rate of income tax because it was unpopular, though, so it seems we cannot trust her word.
Is she planning to pull the usual Tory trick – ditch the unpopular politician but keep the unpopular policy she champions?
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Priti Patel: she’s not one to listen to advice she doesn’t like.
The Home Secretary has confirmed that she is ignoring the advice of an adviser who said the Rwandan government tortures political opponents, in pushing her policy of deporting asylum-seekers there.
Priti Patel insisted that Rwanda was a “safe country”.
She said the comments had been made by “officials in a different government department”.
She added: “But of course it is the Home Office who has led the economic development migration partnership which is our resettlement partnership to Rwanda. Rwanda is a safe country and all our work with the government of Rwanda shows that.”
She was responding to a High Court judgment that seven statements by an adviser should be made public in advance of a Supreme Court ruling on whether the Rwanda deportation policy is legal.
A judge ruled that a further four statements should not be published as they could potentially harm international relations.
It is not unreasonable – on the face of it – for the government to seek advice and then ignore what it is told.
Governments may take opinions from multiple sources before forming their own opinions and policy.
But this has the potential to blow up in the Tory government’s collective face, if the decision to ignore warnings about this foreign government leads to asylum-seekers being harmed.
Illegal policy? Priti Patel announced the plan to deport asylum seekers arriving in the UK to Rwanda back in April. But a first flight there was aborted at the last minute as the legality of the scheme was challenged.
The High Court has ruled that a government adviser’s comment that Rwanda’s government tortures and kills political opponents – and six others – should be published ahead of a legal battle to decide whether deportations to that country are legal.
But four further comments by the same person were judged necessary to keep entirely secret because of the damage they would do to international relations between the UK and that country.
This leads to an obvious question:
Given the incendiary nature of the “torture” comment, how damning were the four that are being kept secret? And how can the UK’s Tory government justify sending asylum seekers to Rwanda after being provided with such information?
“I recognise that there is a strong public interest in not undermining international relations with a friendly state. Nonetheless, that consideration is outweighed by the public interest in ensuring access to relevant information in this litigation and by the extent to which the information is already in the public domain.”
Migrants identified for the first aborted flight, and three media organisations – BBC News, including BBC Two’s Newsnight, The Times and The Guardian newspapers – sought the disclosure of the material.
The judge said given September’s major legal action had to decide whether sending asylum seekers to Rwanda was lawful, the claimants and the court needed to consider as much evidence as possible.
He said some of the official’s comments would have “evidential significance” – and the public interest in disclosing them outweighed the government’s case for keeping them secret.
The government has been allowed time to consider an appeal. If the judgment stands, the comments are likely to emerge in public in September.
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Don’t believe the hype: these two are on the same side really.
Found on Twitter: here’s a thread that’s worth reading.
1/ Astute analysis by the @NewStatesman's @HarrytLambert (doesn't mean he's on our side), which identifies that the #Rwanda flight as a key play in the Tory culture war, designed to draw election battle lines. There is an obvious strategy for dealing this: take it head on. pic.twitter.com/irzSuC85C1
3/ A good portion of the 70million refugees in the world today (many of whom are internally displaced) have been forced to leave by the destruction of their nations by the Anglo Saxon Empire: Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq and more. This is not a conversation the Tories want.
This Site has been making the same point for years, of course.
5/5 Turning the conversation Britain's aggressively war mongering role in the world would shut the debate down dead & the Tories would have to think of a new electoral dividing line. #Labour won't do this, so the Tories will be able to shape the debate as they please
Of course, if Starmer is allied with the Tories on this issue, then is he really the man to lead the Opposition to them?
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Priti Patel: she announced the deportation flights in April – and has been humiliated by the cancellation of the first.
Yes – some of us saw this one coming from a long way away!
The first flight to deport people seeking asylum in the UK to live in Rwanda instead has been halted after a series of last-minute legal appeals.
Oh what a shame. Another Priti Patel plan bites the dirt – and not a moment too soon.
The flight was called off after the European Court of Human Rights intervened.
In a statement hours before the flight’s planned departure, the ECHR said it had granted an “urgent interim measure” in the case of an Iraqi man, known only as “KN”, and one of seven remaining passengers.
An out-of-hours judge was then tasked with examining the remaining half dozen cases.
The flight was originally intended to take 30 people to the African country that is accused of human rights abuses – but has been cancelled after the number was whittled down to nothing.
The architects of the scheme – Boris Johnson and Priti Patel – have said this is a setback but they are determined to make it work.
Johnson suggested lawyers representing migrants were “abetting the work of criminal gangs”.
But this is reducing the situation to a ridiculous degree.
The plan will break the 1951 Refugee Convention that has set the standard for the way that governments should deal with people fleeing persecution in other countries for more than 70 years.
Johnson and Patel have sidestepped the convention by ignoring the complex set of problems surrounding each asylum-seeker and refusing to accept that their arrival is to do with anything more than the criminal acts of people smugglers.
The government has also been accused of acting irrationally in treating Rwanda as a “safe third country”. Critics have correctly pointed out that Rwanda’s record on human rights is flawed.
Still, Patel has vowed that the government will “not be deterred” from its plan and “many of those removed from today’s flight will be placed on the next”.
It’s threatening language from an extremely unpleasant individual.
One can only be left with a sense that the UK’s government is acting against the best interests of the asylum-seekers in its care – unloading them onto a foreign country without the slightest interest in their well-being.
That, of course, is exactly the reason these people don’t want to go.
Johnson and Patel have said they may consider changing the law to make it possible to push the deportations through.
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Minister for inhumanity: Priti Patel’s “Hostile Environment” policies have involved Home Office staff in illegal activities in the past. Now she is being challenged in court to prove her plan to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda is not also against the law.
10 years after the launch of the ‘Hostile Environment’ policy, representatives of Home Office staff are challenging the government in court over things they are being asked to do.
The Public and Commercial Services Union and the Immigration Services Union are challenging Priti Patel’s policies to “pushback” small boats in the English Channel and to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda.
They have strong justification: the “pushback” policy is likely to break international law on asylum while the idea of deportations to Rwanda copies a previous policy by Israel – that didn’t work and was abandoned.
And the Conservative government has a record of “Hostile Environment” criminality.
We all know – don’t we? – about the Windrush Scandal that illegally targeted for deportation a generation of people who had the right to live in the UK but whose documentation had been destroyed.
The Home Office has also wrongly accused 34,000 international students of cheating in English language tests and failed to ensure that innocent people were not wrongly deported.
An Institute for Public Policy Research report in 2020 concluded the hostile environment policy had fostered racism, pushed people into destitution, wrongly targeted people who were living in the UK legally, and had “severely harmed the reputation of the Home Office”.
In the wake of the Windrush scandal the Home Office committed to introduce a total transformation of the department, including a review of the hostile environment policies – and failed to complete it.
So it should be no surprise that civil service representatives are trying to protect workers from having to take part in Priti Patel’s potential crimes.
One glance at comments on the “Hostile Environment” policy by Nazek Ramdan, the director of the charity Migrant Voice, should make the reason crystal clear:
“Perhaps no other policy in living memory has left such a malign mark, a stain like an oil slick. It is racist, xenophobic, immoral, illegal, unfair, punishing, divisive, mean-spirited, discriminatory and counterproductive.”
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This window-writing may have been by a child in care, but it might equally have been written by an adult – or by one of the people employed to care for either of them.
The demand for profit is causing huge harm to the private care system, it has been claimed.
Investor returns have become more important than quality care and workers’ pay, according to research.
Private equity, hedge funds and real estate investment trusts have brought in predatory financial techniques, justified in the name of enticing capital into a sector that the government has persistently failed to adequately fund.
Boris Johnson promised to overhaul the system, more than two years ago. He has yet to lift a finger.
That’s unless you include his government’s Covid-19 strategy that killed – what – 30,000 care home residents, at least?
Iain Duncan Smith wants civil servants to go back to working in the office
The former Tory leader thinks it’s necessary “because there’s an ecosystem around them made up of cafes, restaurants bars, even theatres and other areas that give people jobs and without people back in their offices, going out for sandwiches, you know, coffees, etcetera that ecosystem will collapse and people will lose their jobs”.
Former Tory leader calls for civil servants to be forced to go back to the office https://t.co/DsSQHSqeQU
Business chief asks Johnson to save firms from the damage done by Brexit – and goes unanswered
In response, Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK has asked why business leaders are putting up with Johnson.
A reader responded that they are probably waiting for the Tories to further reduce workers rights and financial reporting standards, while another pointed out that Johnson made his position clear three years ago when he said, “F*ck business.”
Why is business putting up with the Tories? https://t.co/g9ybCGfOxm If business thinks the Tories have got Brexit wrong why aren’t they joining the party to force it to change its ways?
Abbott calls for end to Patel’s cruel mass deportation flights
The fourth mass deportation flight to Jamaica since the Windrush Scandal will leave the UK today (August 11), showing that Home Secretary Priti Patel and her boss Boris Johnson have learned nothing from it.
The excuse is that the deportees are all dangerous criminals – except they aren’t, according to Labour’s Diane Abbott. And they have served the sentence for their crime.
In fact, they are being subjected to double jeopardy, which should be illegal in UK law – penalising people twice for the same crime. It is imposed because the deportees are not white.
There must be a moratorium on these mass deportation flights – Diane Abbott MP exclusive https://t.co/dPdjE3ythe
— Rachael Swindon Cult member 069 – (@Rachael_Swindon) August 9, 2021
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