By Daviemoo
In the last few days alone, Sunak’s government has passed the Rwanda bill, ready to send flights of migrants to a country with almost no housing stock on the verge of war with the Congo at the same time as passing even more measures to punish those on “benefits”, stating that he will remove payment from those who have been out of work for a certain amount of time.
How will any of these moves help our lives improve? The answer is- they won’t. But too many British people will be swayed by another layer of varnish dumped on the cracked walls of our political existence to ask themselves how punishing others uplifts us.
When it comes to Rwanda, Sunak is right that the boats need to stop; not because every boat is heaving with rapists ready to attack British women or with people ready to make a life on benefits. Because it’s clear that the UK’s asylum system cannot handle the numbers or the methods. Rather than focus on a workable strategy like opening processing centres in key countries and making the long awaited safe routes that multiple MPs have failed to describe including ex Home Secretary Suella Braverman at a select committee hearing and as the government ignores widespread alarm about the state of- and safety of Rwanda in terms of migrant safety. Even this morning the news reports that five migrants are feared dead off the coast of Calais, using this as the perfect rationale to push the scheme. But nobody ever seems to be able to answer the crucial questions.
Previously, Sunak and Braverman have spoken of how the Rwanda bill will “break the funding model of people smugglers”. But think logically: the boats will still fill with people who may possibly be sent to Rwanda after arriving. How will that stop people smugglers from being paid? It doesn’t. Because Sunak, because Braverman, think throwing money into the burning pit of racist ideologue is a solution. They don’t want numbers to go down, they want angry, stupid people to be satisfied by an expensive, unworkable plan that doesn’t even address the issue.
But what is the wider problem of this ideological shrapnel grenade of a policy?
Sunak will soon face his first legal challenge from the ECHR. Sunak will use this legal challenge as a lynchpin to further press for removal from the ECHR’s purview: Whilst this isn’t good for those whose rights are abused who have come to the UK from abroad, we as citizens will still be protected by the human rights act- but notice that this, too, is under attack. Truss herself has recently spoken of wanting to tear up the human rights act, and abolish the high court- meaning the government cannot be challenged by its’ own people, essentially beholden only to its own rules.
Let’s look at exactly what the ECHR protects, shall we? Let’s decide which rights we’re fine to forego shall we?
- The Right to life
The right to live. Shall we forego the right to live, in the name of stopping those boats?
Priti Patel once made an argument that the ECHR would thwart attempts to bring back the death penalty- despite the death penalty literally being offered as a loophole in the very ruling of the ECHR to protect the right to life. - Prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment
Ah yes, who needs protection from torture, inhuman or degrading treatments or punishments! We know the tories aren’t the type of people to enact cruel and unusual punishments against their own citizens… right? - Prohibition of slavery and forced labour
Did you know that next to Albanians, British People are the most at risk of modern slavery in the UK? And as that’s the case, does it seem wise to abolish the protection of this right? - Right to liberty and security
Liberty- freedom… Remember that one of the most famous American quotes of all time is “give me liberty or give me death”. People literally died for the right to liberty. - Right to a fair trial
Who needs fair trial, eh?! Who needs a fair trial, under a government who has been found to breach the law multiple times. - No punishment without law
Punish the innocent to get to the guilty does seem to be in vogue with Brits - Right to respect for private and family life
Did you know Tory MP Own Paterson is taking the government to the ECHR over his breach of privacy during the scandal of him taking money from a company who lobbied him for bigger covid contracts? Weird how they like the court when it can help them, isn’t it? - Freedom of thought, conscience, and religion
FREE SPEECH! Unless you say something we don’t like, then we want to take away your right to say it- right? - Freedom of expression
An addition to above- but who needs to express themselves in a country where if you behave perfectly you don’t get punished! What a normal way of thinking. - Freedom of assembly and association
I’d argue that this one is already heavily under assault… the UK’s ridiculous anti protest laws were meant to challenge this one, in the hopes we’d bring cases and the tories could start the association process of “foreign courts meddling”. - Right to marry and right to found a family
Imagine if this right was denied you… is that a life worth living? - Right to an effective remedy
Who needs that! I prefer ineffective remedies. - Prohibition of discrimination
Imagine how upset gammon would be if their human right to the prohibition of discrimination went? You can be racist if you want now- but imagine what can be said and done back to you… - Protection of property
Seems like we might want this? No? Not an important right? - Right to education
I wish more of our red foreheaded British fellows would use this one to be honest - Right to free elections
I mean who needs free elections? The government are so trustworthy!
All too often, Brexit defenders will state that we need to make our own laws and decisions: but who is doing that? A loud, slack jawed minority who hold the tories in populist thrall. They don’t care about how much our bills are, how restricted our rights, how bad our living conditions, how strangled our NHS- provided they see blood from others. The ones who rail for hours and days and weeks against transgender people, migrants, people off work with mental health conditions, people with different coloured skin or accents from other countries. I haven’t made a single law based decision in years and those I’ve tried to make, I’ve lost. I’m led to believe my views aren’t popular… which ones? Green policy? That’s popular across the entire political spectrum. Wealth tax? Only rich people and indoctrinated poor people are against that. The permanent enshrining of basic human rights in a constitution? What absolute idiots would be against that!?
We live in a world where the worst examples of humanity are used as justification to punish an innocent majority, and more and more people seem to accept this framing. We just have to send migrants to Rwanda because some of them are bad horrible people- never mind the fact that there was never a safe route for them to come, so how can you be angry at people for not taking an option they don’t have?! Being angry at people for coming to the country you say is great is insane. And the weirdest part of it is, attacking their human rights is obviously a foolish argument because they are human rights- and you are a human!
Think of it this way; if we decide the worst of us don’t deserve human rights, all it takes is enough people to decide the not so bad of us don’t, then the okay but not perfect people… Removing human rights is out of the question because it is always, always a slippery slope. There but for the grace of fate goes you: and imagine what the tories- or, dare I say it, a Starmer government, would do with dissenters when not bound by layers of human rights protections.
One answer to this is in fact to constitutionalise our rights- but is now the time to ask? Do we really want Sunak- Truss- Braverman- Starmer- Tice to be deciding which of our valuable rights to be constitutionalised? I sure don’t.
We’re in a mess, led as always by the people we’re chained to- the most unaware of us. And I don’t even blame the unaware. When you’re living in a country where your daily experience is to worry about paying your bills, worry about that lump under your arm, worry about your kids eating enough… why would you give a shit about some weird leftist on the internet giving you dire warnings about your human rights?
Some of the worst regimes in history happened alongside peoples’ very pedestrian, day to day lives. They shopped, went to the doctors, got married, received medical treatment under the Nazis. We’re literally watching Israelis throw mini dance parties to disrupt aid trucks from getting to the starving civilians in Gaza.
This is what we’re fostering: we’re seeding the ground ready for our government to commit horrendous atrocities, as the peons who couldn’t even conceptualise fighting back will throng the streets, still wondering about their own lives in the face of the sanctioned horrors happening around them.
All too often we’re told we’re catastrophising- I remember being told I was catastrophising about austerity, catastrophising about the police, crime, courts & sentencing bill that has gutted protest rights, catastrophising about our gutted protest rights, about our ability to vote. It’s harder than it’s been in living memory to protest, it’s harder to take industrial action, it’s harder to simply vote as Rees-Mogg airily talks on stage about gerrymandering and how it backfired on them… We aren’t catastrophising when we’re in the middle of the crash- as the glass and metal screams, shatters and twists around us.
All too often history seems to reflect a peoples who stood around watching horrors unfold, only to scratch their heads and ask “how on earth did that happen?”
How did Nazi Germany come to pass? How are the GOP so radical in America that they’re talking about the “end of democracy”? The answer is- not enough people gave a shit and stopped it. The UK’s government has failed its citizens for years and its reaction is not to get better at the job, it’s to make its citizens quieter. The signs are there- exactly how many klaxons need to sound, before British people panic?
Benefits? Hardly
The truth is, our mindset doesn’t help. How many of us have grown up in homes where we’re told that suffering is moral, that it’s righteous to work yourself to death, that it’s lazy to rest? And how macro can that mindset go to? It’s righteous to forego human rights, because if we’re good little robots, why do we need them? It’s why when it comes to HELPING OUR OWN, the usual refrain we hear when people who don’t want to help migrants. Better to help our own, they say as they cheer through punitive benefits sanctions ushered in by Sunak to gut people’s ability to take time to recover from mental health issues.
As a person who had a breakdown in 2016 who took three months off work and ended up so broken I couldn’t even buy milk at Tescos briefly, I can assure you that HELPING OUR OWN doesn’t start by forcing them to work when they feel like they can’t even talk to another person.
Even the name of Benefits is ironic- what’s the benefit of? Public payment for not working.
The irony is when you’re a leftist people assume you want everyone to be able to claim everything when the fact is, I’d love if we could practically abolish benefits because the country works well enough for us that we don’t need benefits to top up low salaries so people can afford to live; I don’t want there to be a cap on child benefits because I want people to be able to afford to have and raise kids without benefits at all. Crazy right? Benefits are not a benefit, they’re a stipend and they pay back into the very system that lends them out: that £50 a benefits claimant spends on a haircut pays that hairdresser’s hourly rate, pays the rent for the salon… it’s a big circle. We do nothing about the rich, punish the poor, punish the migrants and things just keep getting worse! How odd. Must be the trans people- or those uppety women with all those lovely reproductive rights- bet if we took those away people would fall in line.
How did we become so foolish, so naive? And where does it end. Nowhere good, I fear.
Dangerous times are ahead, and oozing ever closer- and the question to ask is: what will we do about it?
Politically Enraged 