The People’s Swill

How Sunak Fought the War, and the Law Won

One thing about physical matter - and apologies to Uri Geller here - it won’t change just because you want it to change. Anyone who’s ever tried levitation or walking on water will know this. You might want things to be different. It would be nice to float up into the air in your pyjamas with a snowman, if it weren’t for pesky gravity. And walking on water - well who hasn’t want to do that? - but liquid just won’t harden.

The law works according to the same principle. Many of us might have been tempted to do things that the law doesn’t allow, but we don’t because we don’t want to be caught, and since we can’t change them, most of us accept them. And there’s another reason why we accept them: because the rule of law is something that everyone is, or should be, subject to, and because the laws that hold a society together, as imperfect and even unjust as some of them may be, should operate without interference from politicians and governments who might bend them to suit themselves or ignore them to suit themselves.

This doesn’t mean that every law is a good law. The 2023 Public Order Act, for example, is a malicious and brazenly-political piece of draconian legislation, aimed at limiting the democratic right to protest, which is putting peaceful protesters in jail for months and even years, while the government that introduced it refuses even to investigate alleged acts of financial fraud and malfeasance carried out during the pandemic.

But we’ve been here before. We’ve seen authoritarian governments passing authoritarian laws, and we’ve seen these laws (Section 28 comes to mind) overturned. Until the last few years, however, we had never seen a British government openly turning against the judges who interpret the law, simply in order to be able to do things that these judges have ruled against.

This takes us to the so-called Rwanda policy - the policy that the rotting corpse of the Tory party has been clinging onto, the way a vampire exposed to sunlight might suck on a fresh roadkill; the policy that the UK’s corrupt right-wing press never ceases to rage about.

There was a time when the Conservative party - and certainly a Conservative government - would have accepted the Supreme Court judgement, which ruled that its plan to deport migrants to Rwanda was unlawful. But those days are long gone. Now we live in a time when right-wing politicians and journalists yearn for Rwanda, the way better people in a better age once yearned for freedom and justice.

Where Martin Luther King dreamed of all humankind seated at the table of brotherhood, the British right dreams of detention centres thousands of miles away filled with the men, women, and children who dared to come to these shores in search of refuge. Where King broke bad laws through civil disobedience, the fallen idol Braverman and the angry politicians who took to the airwaves last week want to change good laws to realise their nightmare. Like Lee Anderson, and the toadie journalists who amplify their idiocies, they are prepared to do anything - anything - to achieve it. Just send the planes up into the sky, they growl, regardless of what the judges say, or what France says, or what foreigners of any kind have to say, and definitely regardless of what the law says.

Now these paragons of virtue have been thwarted once again, and like John Lee Hooker, they’re mad about it. Now can they lie awake at night, wrapped in the flag and gnashing their teeth in despair at the woke judges who continue to allow what Douglas Murray called ‘settlers’ into our generous but foolish country, and begging whoever will listen to please, please, please, let them get what they want.

As Morrissey once sang, It’s enough to make a good man turn bad, and he should know. And the more these patriots are thwarted, the more they cling onto that glorious vision: thousands upon thousands of migrants, dragged kicking and screaming from their luxury hotels and plasma tv sets, touching down at Kigali airport to have their asylum claims processed by the country we have so desperately and cravenly bribed to do this, in order to slip out of our legal and moral obligations.

Never mind that no one, literally no one, has ever come up with a smidgeon of evidence to suggest that the Rwanda policy will ‘work’ - insofar as working means stopping migrants coming here. There is no evidence that it would ‘break the smugglers’ business model.' No one has attempted to demonstrate how sending perhaps a thousand people at once to Rwanda would deter the thousands of people who have been crossing the Channel each year.

And yet the supporters of the policy don’t care. Like cargo cultists, they wait for John Frum to stop the boats, even he won’t. They believe what they want to believe, and many of them seem to have more interest in fighting for the policy than in the outcome. The stupidity of this borders on a kind of insanity. Why would any political party invest so much political capital in such a profoundly-flawed policy with very little prospect of implementation, let alone ‘success’?

Political messaging is one reason. The architects of the policy might claim they’re being cruel to be kind, but the reality is they’re being cruel to be cruel, in order to transmit an image of harsh intransigent ‘toughness’ to the people the government and the Tory party think will be impressed by this kind of thing.

Secondly, the policy is a classic wedge issue; it is designed to create and widen divisions, and polarise society along the faultlines that were opened by Brexit. To some extent, it is a continuation of Brexit by other means. After eight years, in which Brexit has yet to produce a single tangible benefit, its supporters have presented the Rwanda policy, as the one thing they can do, even if they can’t.

If Rwanda is another stick with which to beat the libtards and the wokeists who tried to ‘stop Brexit’, or simply refused to celebrate it, it’s also another manifestation of ‘sovereignty’ - in the sense of the ‘sovereign right to defend our borders’ etc. This framing makes it possible to pick new fights over the ECHR in search of the holy grail of pure Brexit, whilst also taking on the globalists’, the lefty-lawyers, bleeding-heart internationalists and all the other straw men the right wants to burn.

The Rwanda policy, according to its supporters, is also another expression of the ‘will of the people.’ Again and again, the politicians defending it suggest -without evidence, because some things are best left without evidence - that they are merely implementing the ‘will’ of the silent majority. Where Brexiters once depicted a narrow referendum result as an expression of the popular will, supporters of the Rwanda policy present it as another manifestation of the virtuous majority, thwarted by a corrupt and treacherous ‘elite.’

Swirling around the fringes of this toxic playing-field is the ‘great replacement theory’ - to which Braverman pandered before her smirking departure. Not for nothing was Nigel Farage the first person to draw attention to migrant boats back in 2020 - this is a shark who always scents political blood. Last but by no means least, the Rwanda policy is a colossal distraction from twelve years of calamitous Tory misrule, in which nemesis is coming, however timidly, in the form of Keir Starmer’s Labour party.

To call this unhealthy would be understating it considerably. But if these dishonourable deceivers can’t get their planes in the air, they always find a new level of low. In 2016, Tory politicians supported by the right-wing press, called the Supreme Court ‘enemies of the people’ because its judges ruled that the government would need parliamentary consent to trigger Article 50 and leave the European Union.

As we know, the right hated that. After all, why ‘win back’ sovereignty only for your government to submit its decisions to the sovereignty of an elected parliament? Was that what our ancestors fought for? And now, eight wretched years later, we find Brendan Clarke-Smith - a politician of nuclear bunker-level density - recycling the same headline on his Twitter feed in response to the Supreme Court’s Rwanda ruling:

In Brexitland its always deja vu all over again, and it needs to be, because otherwise people might start asking the questions that those who started it don’t want to answer. And so we are in Groundhog Day, with even Dominic Cummings slipping back into character and calling for a new fight to leave the ECHR.

Never mind that the Supreme Court’s decision was determined primarily by doubts concerning Rwanda’s commitment to the principle of non-refoulement (not returning refugees to a country where they might be at risk of harm or persecution) - a principle to which the UK is committed through various treaties, in addition to the ECHR.

More importantly, Rishi Sunak, a politician hovering perpetually between being and nothingness, and so devoid of passion and authenticity that he makes Keir Starmer look like Rob Roy, is proposing to pass ‘emergency legislation’ to get round the ruling, and declare Rwanda a ‘safe country.’ Reporting on that decision the yawning abyss-cum-court scribe known as Quentin Letts, dipped his purple pen into a bowl of unctuous gruel:

At last, ice-blue anger from this Prime Minister.

He's slow to rage, Rishi Sunak, but there was a cold curtness about him when he gave a news conference about the Supreme Court's latest extraordinary interdiction of the public will.

'Let me tell everyone now,' he snarled, 'I will not allow a foreign court to block these flights.' He was referring not to the Supreme Court – does being on another planet count as 'foreign'? – but to judges in Strasbourg, home of the European Court of Human Rights.

They stopped Rwanda flights from leaving British soil.

This is straight from the ‘enemies of the people’ playbook, and if you had any doubts about what roused Head Boy Sunak from his banal stupor, Letts was there to remove them, with this vignette:

He almost spat the words. Those dark eyes, normally gooey, blazed like two lumps of hot coal. Not that we're allowed coal any more. Bloody activists even stopped that.

Leave aside Sunak’s ice-blue anger, cold curtness and blazing gooey eyes for a moment, consider what our hot-blooded scribe had to say about the poor old judges:

The judiciary's lordliest old boobies had sided with UN campaigners rather than their own country's ministers…There were countless robed orderlies and high-backed swivel chairs for the judges, Milords Reed, Hodge and Lloyd-Jones. Three buzzards on a gibbet.

The bad writing is one thing, but the ‘judges-versus-the-people’ sentiments are far worse. Faced with another unfavourable judgement from the final appeal court in the UK, Sunak tweeting that he was ‘taking the extraordinary step of introducing emergency legislation to confirm Rwanda is safe. I will not allow a foreign court, like the European Court of Human Rights, to block these flights.’

No point suggesting to our incandescent Prince Hal that doing this is likely to be as effective as passing a law confirming that Pentonville jail is actually Centreparcs. You can repeat till you’re blue in the face: The. ECHR. Did. Not. Block. These. Flights.

That’s not the game this government, or this party, or the right-wing press is playing. They are gambling, but facts are not their currency. Attacking the Supreme Court may seem like a small bet, amid the great splurge of the last eight years, but there is reason behind it, even if that reason is not decent.

This is Brexit-meets-MAGA. It is, to use Letts’s words, a gooey-flirtation with the worst kind of populism: the kind where ‘populism’ slides towards pre-fascism; where presidents refuse to accept that they have lost elections; where governments refuse to accept legal rulings that they don’t like; and institutions intended to check the power of the executive are swatted away by the executive in the name of the people.

Sunak’s gambit may be doomed. There are so many hurdles to his ‘emergency legislation’ that can bring it down. Even if it gets passed, pesky political reality will still be out there. Rwanda will still be what it is. International treaties will still be what they are, and nothing Global Britain can do or say can change that, short of passing emergency legislation removing itself from the world completely.

But as with Brexit, and with so much else, it’s not the outcome, it’s the process that matters here. It’s the division, the cruelty, the endless fight and the endless distraction.

It’s the swill of the people, and that’s the drink that Sunak and the gimlet-eyed pitchfork mob that the Tory party has become are drinking, and they want everyone else to drink it too.