During his time as very occasional Mayor of London, alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was, as the late Russell Harty might have put it, famous, nay, notorious for spraying public funds up the wall. Vanity buses, vanity cable car, plan for a vanity airport, vanity water cannon that never saw service, vanity garden bridge that never got built, all showed the world the scale of Bozo’s largesse - providing someone else was paying.
Smirktastic, pop pickers
So it has continued in Government, and last night brought another half a million notes sunk and lost as Benidorm Holiday Rep Priti Patel, for some reason elevated to run the Home Office, failed in her bid to rile up the Gammonati by sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, on the false premise that this would discourage people traffickers from putting them into inflatable boats and sending them across the Channel from France.
The real target of this rotten policy
No people traffickers have been arrested, or even mildly inconvenienced. The policy is just to shore up the racist right, that part of the Tory vote the party needs to have any chance of hanging on to all those “
Red Wall” seats it won in 2019. There is no other consideration in play, no matter what excuse is offered up, or how the alleged policy is dressed and packaged.
Nor, it seems, has there even been any consideration as to whether Ms Patel’s whizzo wheeze was even legal. Because, last night, as an already-paid-for Boeing 767 stood there on the apron at RAF Boscombe Down, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Bozo and his Home Secretary were about to abuse the human rights of those being deported.
The bad news for the Tories came from QC Jessica Simor: “
European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg grants rule 39 request to stop the flight to Rwanda from leaving. Basis: real risk of inhuman and degrading treatment (Art. 3 ECHR). Please share - government must comply”.
There was more. “
This is in relation to one individual but the ruling contains a generic test that would apply to any of the applicants who have pending legal proceedings, which is likely all of them in so far as they have sought interim injunctions (ie until their cases are heard)”. So was that that?
Paul Brand of ITV brought confirmation that that was indeed that: “
Home Office source believes we are now down to zero on the flight - they do not expect it to take off. But they are trying to confirm with Home Office lawyers … the flight will not be taking off after all asylum seekers were pulled off”.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan took time out from dealing with Bozo’s rotten legacy to us know where he stood. “
Tonight's inhumane deportation of asylum seekers to #Rwanda has been stopped by the ECtHR - minutes before it was due to depart. Sending people fleeing violence to a country thousands of miles away was already cruel and callous. It's now potentially unlawful too”.
Tory cheerleaders were soon talking up leaving the ECHR. But David Allen Green had bad news for them. “
Remember - the Good Friday Agreement expressly requires the UK to have the ECHR directly enforceable in Northern Ireland. Ergo, the UK cannot leave the ECHR without breaking the Good Friday Agreement”. Which it claims to want to protect. Oh dear!
Jo Maugham had an additional reminder. “
The only countries ever to leave the European Convention on Human Rights are Greece, temporarily, after a military coup, and Russia, after invading Ukraine. In case you were wondering what kind of company we'd be in if we left”. Yes, well.
And the Tweeter known as Otto English had done the sums, just to demonstrate how conservative Ms Patel’s singularly nasty gesture was not. “
£500,000 to deport 8 people plus the estimated £30,000 per head cost of processing them in Rwanda. That's £93,500 each rather than the £12,000 it costs to process them here. Quite apart from the revolting inhumanity of it, that's bonkers sums in a cost of living crisis”. Well, quite.
A million kids go hungry while Bozo and his coterie of ineptitude laugh at them, cheered on by the bad faith actors in our free and fearless press. Meanwhile, LBC host James O’Brien had a reminder for the Tories and their media cheerleaders.”
Please note the absence of any suggestion that people facing deportation fit any of the racist tropes used to justify the barbaric policy. They are not criminals or threats or terrorists. Their ‘crime’ was simply to get here. Like Nadhim Zahawi did, like Priti Patel’s parents did”.
He would have approved
And still no people traffickers have been stopped: they make a sale, get their money, their trade continues. But they were never the target: this is a cruel and obscenely inhumane idea dreamed up just to fight another phoney culture war, yet it serves one telling purpose: it exposes those who support it as unprincipled and inhumane bigots, charlatans of the lowest order.
They should stop and think, look in the mirror, ask themselves why they would treat their fellow human beings in such a callous way just to gin up the bigots. They will not.
The sickness of the media class is thus exposed.
Enjoy your visit to
Zelo Street? You can help this truly independent blog carry on talking truth to power, while retaining its sense of humour, by becoming a Patron on Patreon at
https://www.patreon.com/Timfenton
And then there’s the small matter of the £120 million bribe ^w aid package to Rwanda. But remember, kids, the it's the Tories who are the party of financial responsibility.
ReplyDeleteUgli Patel, the poison dwarf of the British far right. A woman without any discernible decency or sense of humanity. A typical tory.
ReplyDeleteAnother example of a country that long ago ditched any semblance of common understanding or feeling for society. The insensate beasts who own and run Britain will ensure it continues to fall into a cesspit of racism, greed, paranoia and wilful ignorance.
Plainly yet another war is needed to distract attention. And you can safely bet there's enough morons to fall for it. Again.
The traffickers are obviously entrepreneurs, embarking on a venture that would be backed by the Tories. That is why no one targets them.
ReplyDeleteMost of us here will know the ECHR is not under the jurisdiction of the EU. But try telling the likes of the Mail that, which described the ECHR as a ''Euro court'', a headline designed to put the idea that the ECHR and the EU are linked.
ReplyDeleteGiven the ECHR was drafted largely by British lawyers and senior judges at the behest of Churchill, and that Churchill considered the ECHR as one of his biggest achievements, it's highly amusing that brexiters are happy to trash his legacy by slating the ECHR at every opportunity despite often using him as a poster boy for their cause.
They're aiming their fury at Prince Charles for speaking out and blaming the lack of council houses on them. I suppose they can't blame them for taking our jobs anymore since Bozo claims the highest employment rate ever......this was a real outburst by someone I work with. I tried to calmly explain the facts but gave up when she started going on about not agreeing with apologies for slavery because we were enslaved by the Romans' and we don't ask for apologies......As she identifies as a Christian, it will be fun to find out her take on the whole of the upper tier of the Anglican church coming out against this policy
ReplyDeleteSpaffer and Thunder Thighs!
ReplyDelete