As the Conservative Party writhes in the final death throes of their wretched regime that has inflicted upon its citizens – among other horrors – austerity, Covid corruption and destruction of the NHS, the grotesque and putrid autopsy is abhorrent yet simultaneously comical. And I say this from the position of being a previous member of the Tory Party and former elected second tier politician with a qualifying law degree.
Britishness
The passing of the Rwanda Bill abjectly contradicts what it is to be British. Of the plethora of submissions on this subject I favour Martin Bell’s analysis – the former independent MP who always appeared in the House of Commons in his resplendent white suit – “It’s tolerance, decency and a determination to talk about the weather on all occasions and a tendency, when a stranger stands on one’s foot, to apologise.”
However, it is not the callousness and anti-Britishness of this repulsive act of parliament (I was hoping that King Charles III would be minded to breach our unwritten constitution and tell Rishi Sunak where he could stick the Bill), or the real and present danger of breaching international law, that is the subject of this narrative but the final nail in the myth of Brexit.
Leave means leave
For committed Brexiteers (and so they should be), regaining a perceived loss of sovereignty represented the most prized victory. Today the landscape is still soiled by various actors who peddle this untruth. This raucous rabble include many stubborn stains and are perhaps best represented by Ann Widdecombe, Lord David Frost, Andrea “sun lit uplands” Leadsom and, of course, the beer-swilling so called man of the people with a surname that rhymes with garage but who insists that it is uttered in a more flamboyant manner. Indeed, David Cameron concluded that the man who once finished behind a candidate who was championed by a man dressed as a dolphin in the 2010 general election was saying it in a “poncey, foreign-sounding” way.
However, the unfortunate position is that almost eight agonisingly painful years after the referendum for those that still cling onto this fraud no analysis will sway their cognitive dissonance. If you happen to be one of these unfortunates, I strongly recommend that you leave at this juncture and pay homage to Saint George, the revered patron saint of England, who was born in Cappadocia – now a part of Turkey. Irony is never lost on the hardcore Brexiteer who would probably implode if they were able to digest this fact and subsequently accepted that if the very symbol of the English nation appeared on our shores today – with no safe and legal route available – he would be placed on a plane to Africa. And even if he were latterly able to show that his asylum claim was valid, there would be no route back to the land of the fictional three lions.
Nevertheless, let the rest of us examine the headline claim.
The case in question
The bill explicitly illustrates the principle of parliamentary supremacy. In other words, the UK parliament can do anything they wish and are not beholden to any other entity in the universe, or facts, rules, or conventions. If so minded, parliament can simply make it up as they go along, and we are legally bound to follow, even if it’s palpably insane.
For the government to go gaga is rare, although first year law undergraduates are entertained by the notion that the UK parliament could ultimately pass a law making it an offence to be French in France. The stuff of legal freshers’ frivolity and an outcome that would never come to pass. But hold the front page! This academic absurdity has become reality since this bill defies legal gravity. It bends the truth by 180 degrees – something this present incarnation of the Conservative Party have perfected as their special contribution to the ugly spectre of a post-truth world.
In November 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that Rwanda was not a safe place for the government to send asylum seekers. Given its awful human rights record, and the 1994 genocide, it is unsurprising that the highest court in the land reached this decision. Yet the bill makes it a safe place. At the behest of parliamentary supremacy, it simply becomes safe. Black becomes white, right becomes left, and day becomes night. Or, as independent peer Lord Alton of Liverpool concurred, simply legislating Rwanda is safe “doesn’t make it so,” adding, “Saying a dog is a cat doesn’t make it such. It may be your opinion, but it isn’t true.” To say that the House of Lords ravaged the bill is an understatement. It came to pass due to the mechanics of our fragile constitution that bended its knee to the overwhelming government majority born out of the Lying King’s (Boris Johnson’s) landslide 2019 general election victory that included the epic misdirection’s of “getting Brexit done” with “an oven ready deal.” Former President Obama press aide, Tommy Vietor, voiced my particular favourite appraisal by describing Johnson as a “shapeshifting creep.”
Thus, the Rwanda Bill conclusively demonstrates that the UK parliament is impervious to any control whatsoever, and those in Brussels never had any control over dear old Blighty.
Bizarrely, the government slyly acknowledged this nonsense in the little read 2017 policy paper, The United Kingdom’s exit from, and new partnership with, the European Union that clarified the existing and infallible independence of the UK: (item 2.1) ─ “The sovereignty of Parliament is a fundamental principle of the UK constitution. Whilst Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU, it has not always felt like that.”
But when has the truth ever got in the way of this government?
© Ian Kirke 2024
@ianjkirke
Title photograph by Rocco Dipoppa on Unsplash