Evil Exists

Robert Jenrick, the UK's Immigration Minister, resigned because a bill to send migrants to Rwanda doesn't breach enough human rights legislation. 

These people are evil.

It is surreal watching BBC News at the best of times, but the past few months have been borderline incomprehensible. The logic of the Rwanda policy is so flagrantly bizarre that every interview seems like a scene from a satirical comedy, written by people so insecure about their ability to send a clear message that they make their characters regularly verbally signpost how evil they are. 

The base logic is as follows: "small boats" are causing a national emergency. In order to stop these small boats, we need to deport random asylum seekers to Rwanda, which is the only possible country we can send them to, and the only possible way of stopping the existential threat of dinghies in the Channel. The European Convention on Human Rights, the Human Rights Act, the Refugee Convention, and all other international law, would prevent this scheme from happening as fast as it needs to, and therefore absolutely all of them are roadblocks to be smashed apart. If even one bit of human rights legislation remains intact, people might be able to challenge their own deportation, and so no self-respecting government minister could stay in government unless the Prime Minister agrees to openly declare himself in opposition to all human rights law.

How the fuck do people spend all of their waking hours believing, and defending, such a clogged bog of bullshit?

It's because they're evil. Jenrick was notorious before this for ordering a Disney cartoon mural painted over in a children's asylum refuge centre. 

I'll start from the "Prime Minister needs to openly declare himself against all human rights law" bit and work backwards. Two ministers have now resigned, citing this as a major sticking point; Suella Braverman, and now Robert Jenrick, both focussed most of their resignation letters on condemning Rishi Sunak's failure to openly breach international law. Braverman has accused Sunak of "intellectual incoherence" for not believing sincerely enough in the above nonsense. Jenrick said Sunak's bill represents "the triumph of hope over experience".

Hope?

This is like Braverman's "dream" of seeing planes take off to Rwanda, which she unashamedly fantasised about in a publicly-broadcast interview. Hearing her use the word makes you question whether you ever really understood it; if "dreams" can now mean fascistic deportations, and "hope" now represents Rishi fucking Sunak, maybe the Tories have successfully scorched the words of all sense.

In order to qualify as a bleeding-heart, hope-blinded utopian, all Sunak had to do was be publicly vague about adhering to international human rights law. The bill 'disapplies' quite a lot of human rights legislation already, and goes directly against the UK's Supreme Court, but none of that is enough for the 'experienced' members of the Tory hard-right. If he's not willing to violate the Geneva Convention, he's basically Martin Luther King. The wrong kind of dreamer.

The Tory 'hard-right' (which is the BBC's euphemistic way of describing an extremist death-cult currently trying to kick the party into the black pit of full authoritarianism) are against human rights law because it offers opportunities for people to challenge government. Braverman told Nick Robinson that the "vague wording" of legislation would allow people to contest their deportation to Rwanda via the courts. This, according to the former Home Secretary, would be a bad thing. 

Now, I've read plenty of left-wing critiques of human rights law. It's an overly Eurocentric, liberal-humanist, anthropocentric, often ignored, fundamentally-inadequate framework that often bolsters the neoliberal European states by giving them a misleading air of respectability. But there's critique of inadequate protective legal frameworks, and then there's naked authoritarianism. If the main obstacle to what you're trying to achieve is international human rights law, you're fucking evil. Surely, anyone with even a shred of self-awareness, would not be able to spend most of their working hours trying to systemically overrule human rights law without at some point looking themselves in the mirror and asking "are we the baddies?"

It's not like those ordinary people caught up in the swirling of global political chaos have much chance at actually winning a court case against the government anyway. The Tories have, for years now, treated international treaties with reckless abandon, in order to make life as miserable as possible for people who've come here to escape war. Under Theresa May, they deported 83 people who had a genuine legal claim to be here, as part of a policy openly called "Hostile Environment". Those desperate people the government insists on calling "illegal immigrants", those diverse and phenomenally brave people who make a perilous journey across the ocean in the hope of a more hospitable life, are some of the most marginalised and silenced people anywhere. The full force of the most powerful states on the planet is geared toward detaining and imprisoning them.

As they always do, the BBC has entirely, and uncritically, accepted the government's framing of the "small boats issue" - this is what leads to the surrealism of their current interviews. Instead of grilling the government on what justification they have for flagrantly operating in direct conflict with human rights law, they instead ask "how can we be sure that this bill will stop the boats?"

Countless smug journalists catch politicians out by citing the "Tory hard-right", and its indefatigable complaints of no confidence, as evidence that they're "not going far enough" to stop the boats. We are now in the position of watching ministers stutter and fumble as they try to justify why they haven't openly violated international law.

There is no reason, other than institutional bias, for the BBC to accept this framework. It's rooted in complete fantasy. Minister after minister, without irony, declares that the greatest existential threat to the nation is "small boats". Small boats. Not military battleships, not tidal waves; rubber fucking dinghies. And this language obscures the actual targets of the policy; Braverman's personal vendetta is not against ocean vessels. It's against the people travelling in them. 

It should go without saying that sending small numbers of vulnerable people to Rwanda every once in a while will not make the UK any nicer to live in. It will not lower energy bills. It will not lower the price of housing, or food. It will not avert the climate crisis which kills more people in the UK each year. It will not even stop immigration into the country - people come because they need to, not because they fancy fish and chips. The best way to prevent mass immigration is to cancel IMF debts, and allow the rest of the world to recover from what we've done to it.

We do need to "stop the boats". Not the tiny rafts targeted by the egomaniacs in government, but the enormous yachts and cruise ships owned by the 1%, whose emissions are destroying the habitability of the planet.  

The only means through which to stop the ultra rich and their state-appointed defenders from killing all of us is to take them at their word - for what are Braverman and Jenrick arguing except that, at a time of existential emergency, it is our responsibility to ignore the law?

The time has come for revolution.