The Conservative Party is writhing in its final death throes, a consequence of its obsession with the Rwanda Bill, Brexit and its own deceit. It’s a grotesque spectacle, both abhorrent and comical. And I say this as 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. I favour Martin Bell’s analysis of what that means best. The former independent MP who always appeared in the House of Commons in his resplendent white suit called it thus: “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.”
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. It is not the callousness and anti-Britishness of this repulsive Act of Parliament or the real and present danger of breaching international law that is the subject of this narrative: it is the final nail in the myth of Brexit.
Leave means leave
For committed Brexiteers (and committed 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, and Andrea “sunlit uplands” Leadsom.
First among equals is the beer-swilling so-called man of the people with a surname that rhymes with garage but who insists it is pronounced 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 painful years after the referendum no analysis will sway the cognitive dissonance of those that still cling onto this fraud. If you are 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 was born in Cappadocia – now a part of Turkey. Irony is never lost on the hardcore Brexiteer who would probably implode if they were confronted with the thought that if the very symbol of the English nation appeared on our shores today – with no safe and legal route available – he would be 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.
Rwanda: the case in question
Let us return to the Rwanda Bill and the nature of what it means to be British. The bill explicitly illustrates the principle of parliamentary supremacy. 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 according to parliament, the bill makes it a safe place.
The UK parliament can do anything it wishes and is not beholden to any facts, rules, conventions or other entity in the universe. 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. It could ultimately pass a law making it an offence to be French in France which would entertain first year law undergraduates, if nothing else.
For a government to go this gaga is rare. However, this absurdity has become reality. The bill defies legal gravity. It bends the truth by 180 degrees – something the current Conservative Party have perfected as their special contribution to the ugly spectre of a post-truth world. At the behest of parliamentary supremacy, black becomes white, right becomes left, and day becomes night. 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.”
The final nail
We are here as a result of the mechanics of our fragile constitution that bent its knee to the overwhelming government majority achieved in the landslide 2019 general election victory of Boris Johnson (the Lying King or “shapeshifting creep” – my particular favourite appraisal from former President Obama press aide, Tommy Vietor) that included the epic misdirection of “getting Brexit done” with “an oven ready deal”.
Thus, we “took back control”. The Rwanda Bill conclusively demonstrates that the UK parliament is impervious to any outside influence 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?
