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In Alice Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen tells Alice that she has no problem in believing “six impossible things before breakfast”. Rishi Sunak now proposes to outdo the queen by passing a law which declares Rwanda a safe place, ignoring all evidence to the contrary. British courts must in future accept this impossibility as true, though everybody knows it to be false.
Future students of history writing their PhDs about the implosion of British political leadership in the early 21st century may be instructed by their tutors to examine carefully a transcript of Sunak’s press conference this week in which he defended his bizarre new legislation.
“I have never heard of them [the Government] trying to change the facts by law,” says Lord Sumption, former Supreme Court judge, “For as long as black isn’t white, the business of passing acts of Parliament to say that it is, [will be] profoundly discreditable.”
Designed to divert public attention
As the Gaza bloodbath continues, Europe is gripped by devastating war in Ukraine and 4.2 million British children live in poverty, the Government is fixated on a fantasy project to send a few hundred aslyum seekers to Rwanda at a cost of £240m so far, which was originally designed to divert public attention away from other failures.
I had a minor bout of Covid over the past week which meant that I was involuntarily housebound and able to spend longer than I normally would watching Sunak defending his Rwanda plan, while Boris Johnson was being questioned by the Covid inquiry.
Seeing them perform simultaneously, I was struck by the degree to which the present and past prime ministers share similar characteristics, a seeming inability to tell the truth being the most glaring. Both veer opportunistically from political gambit to political gambit, with little continuity in between. Johnson was famously nicknamed “the trolley” because of his constant zig-zagging, but over the last year Sunak has been his equal in whizzing unpredictably from side to side.
Stuffed with fiction
Johnson usually opts for full-throated denials, so it was unsurprising to see him claiming that well-attested stories of drink parties at No 10 during lockdown were “a million miles from reality”. Yet Sunak’s speech at his press conference a few miles away in central London was equally stuffed with nonsense.
The sheer absurdity of asserting that Rwanda is a safe place has taken people’s breath away. It is not just that Rwanda is unsafe, but it spreads lethal insecurity to its neighbours.
An example is a murderous Rwandan-backed militia called M23, which has butchered its way through the eastern provinces of the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo.
“The M23’s unrelenting killings and rapes are bolstered by the military support Rwandan commanders provide the rebel armed group,” says Clémentine de Montjoye, Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Sunak says that the new law meets the Supreme Court’s concerns about Rwanda, but this is simply untrue. The court cited, among its many reasons for deeming Rwanda unsafe, remarked on the Rwandan government’s track record of failing to keep agreements about the fate of asylum seekers, such as one signed with Israel almost identical to that signed by the UK.
Sunak even threw in Lord Sumption’s name at the end of his speech as “believing the bill will work.” This was wholly misleading and what Sumption had actually said was that the bill might work in the sense of forcing British courts to obey its provisions, but it was fatally flawed and illegal in international law because it denies “access to the courts.” The bill is unprecedented in telling courts to accept something as true which the Supreme Court has said is untrue. This is all being done, in defence of “our national character.”
If Johnson and Sunak were conscious misleaders, this might be less destructive. As it is, the Covid-19 inquiry barristers naively asked Johnson why or when he had decided for or against lockdowns on several occasions, as if judicious review of available evidence was his forte. Yet the grossness of Johnson’s unforced errors tend to mask similar poor judgement calls by Sunak, such as his virus-spreading “Eat out to Help Out” scheme.
Easy to demonise and denounce
It is not easy to find the right vocabulary to describe the current generation of British political leaders. Easy to demonise and denounce, detested and despised by much of the British, it is possible to take them too seriously, and over-estimate these very light weight people.
Johnson is widely described as a charlatan, but I prefer the word “mountebank” because it originated in quacks selling fake medicines beside the road. Liz Truss has a sort of self-obsessed tunnel vision that is not quite the same as stupidity, but leads to stupid actions.
Dominic Raab is similarly blind to inconvenient facts, his disappearance on holiday as Foreign Secretary during the calamitous retreat from Kabul in 2021 being the equivalent of Truss’s catastrophic mini-budget the following year.
Once, Rishi Sunak was presented as grown-up and sane compared with the weird and disaster-prone menagerie he succeeded. But over the past few months, he has shown himself as trolley-like and shallow as the worst of them.
Watching him in action this week, I tried to think of the right word to describe him and came up with “spiv”, a term seldom used these days, but one which catches Sunak’s energetic plausibility combined with a powerful dash of opportunism.
Old-fashioned silliness
I used to reassure myself with the hope that Sunak, Truss, Johnson and their chief lieutenants might be toxic, but their very dysfunctionality provided an antidote to them doing too much lasting harm to British society.
They might be toxic, but they have a strain of old-fashioned silliness that might make them less dangerous. Once upon a time, Tory ministers were accused of being “silly-clever”, but nobody would say that of the present lot. A more accurate descriptive phrase today would be “silly-stupid”, but I wonder if that would ever catch on.
I fear I am being over-optimistic or under-rate another danger. Voters are fed up with blustering governments that fail to deliver and fail to make the trains, or anything else, run on time.
Sir Keir Starmer and Labour determinedly deny that they would change anything much if elected. Another few years of national decline comparable to other states and increasingly pervasive demoralisation might well see people open to a more radical and authoritarian solutions to their problems – probably from the far right.
There is a growing whiff of Weimar in the air as Britain continues to be misruled by a very strange collection of people. I recall my journalist father describing to me how, in the aftermath of the Munich Agreement in 1938, he watching a gaggle of politicians in some European capital. A man beside him shook his head in disbelief at the sight, saying: “I am by profession a caricaturist, but here photography suffices.”
Further thoughts
I was watching the Covid inquiry when somebody mentioned the “Kent Variant”, a highly infectious and lethal mutation of the Covid-19 virus that was first detected near Margate on the Isle of Thanet in east Kent in September 2020.
Since I live in Canterbury, 15 miles from Margate, I have a proprietary interest in the variant which tore through Britain and later the entire world during the course of that winter. I followed its spread in east Kent as best I could by locating local eyewitnesses whom I interviewed over the phone.
I found the progress of the virus on the ground far more interesting than the goings-on of Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock and government in general. What I found missing in media coverage of the pandemic was an informed understanding of conditions on the ground and to what degree centrally-made decisions were actually implemented.
Were they, indeed, implemented even partially or even at all? How many people really locked down and how far was this determined by their economic and social conditions?
Long ago, when the UK had a vibrant provincial press, it might not have proved too difficult to obtain details about the impact of the pandemic in different parts of Britain.
But local press reporting today is so sparse and superficial, echoing local health officials whose own information is second hand, that it is hardly worth reading. Nevertheless, it was obvious that the Covid virus was at its most prevalent where deprivation was greatest.
The Kent variant was ultimately to kill hundreds of thousands of people around the world. But it had its start in north Kent along the south side of the Thames Estuary. It was particularly severe in the Isle of Thanet, and Swale, which is a few miles to the west along the Kent coast.
Among the poorest places in Britain, inequality in these districts is high: a woman living in the most affluent ward of Thanet will live on average 22 years longer than one living in the most deprived ward.
I wrote about the spread of the Kent cariant extensively at the time: Here is an excerpt from one article for the London Review of Books:
“It would be difficult to find a place where coronavirus was more likely to flourish and to enhance its mode of attack than Thanet and Swale. As in much of coastal Britain, few of the towns here are still working ports or seaside resorts. What industry there once was is largely gone, taking with it the few well-paying jobs. Of the 15 most deprived neighbourhoods in Kent, seven are in Thanet and six in Swale…
“Everything about the average working life of someone in Swale or [the Isle of] Sheppey puts them at risk. Much of this is to do with the need to go out to work. As Jackie Cassell, a public health specialist at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School who grew up on Sheppey, put it, “poverty is a mechanism for increasing social contact”.
“People on the island are more likely than the population at large to use public transport to get to work, doing shifts of eight or more hours a day in warehouses or on construction sites. And people with little money are more likely to look after sick or ageing relatives.
“In a study of working patterns, Cassell found that on average someone who goes out to work has 12 prolonged or close periods of contact with people and 17 brief or distant ones; those working from home have only two close or prolonged periods of contact and two brief or distant ones.”
Beneath the radar
I found this investigation by two Israeli publications into why Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is producing such terrible loss of Palestinian lives both chilling and convincing.
According to the article, the Israeli army expanded its authorisation “for bombing non-military targets, the loosening of constraints regarding expected civilian casualties, and the use of an artificial intelligence system to generate more potential targets than ever before, appear to have contributed to the destructive nature of the initial stages of Israel’s current war on the Gaza Strip. The result has been one of the deadliest military campaigns against Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948.”
Cockburn’s picks
One of the problems about covering the bombing of cities in the Middle East and North Africa is that those doing the killing often simply lie about targeting – and killing – civilians.
They claim that figures produced by local health workers for the number of dead and injured is exaggerated or untrue – and it is difficult to prove the opposite.
In the case of Gaza, estimable work has been done by Airwars, an organisation which identifies the dead and investigates who killed them with meticulous accuracy. Here is their investigation into one air strike on a refugee camp in Gaza on 31 October.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.