Taking Over The Asylum

It has come out that the Foreign Office cited public interest immunity to suppress its knowledge of torture and extrajudicial executions in Rwanda. Never mind the European Convention on Human Rights. It was found today that sending people to such a country was a breach of British Statute Law and of English Common Law.

So Rishi Sunak has openly said that he intended to introduce legislation to declare Rwanda safe as a legal fiction. He almost said those words. The Loony Right, which Sunak's attempts to placate are entirely pointless, has lost Lord Sumption on this. One hopes that his days of providing it with intellectual cover are at an end. What has it ever done for him?

Labour will probably abstain on the Bill, and it will undoubtedly make no commitment to repeal the Act. After all, it would love those powers once it had them, and it had no plan to do anything else with the £200 million that has already been paid to a Rwandan regime that, what luck, employs Tony Blair.

Just as it has no objection to a Health Secretary whose husband is the managing director of British Sugar, or to an Environment Secretary whose wife is a director of Anglian Water, which is under investigation for illegal dumping of raw sewage. It certainly has no plan to do as the huge majority of the population wants and renationalise water.

Or, indeed, anything else. As Alstom prepares to go under, it is blatantly obvious that a publicly owned rail network, with no split between track and train, should have publicly owned suppliers that, subject to that responsibility, would be free to take on additional work at home and abroad. Not because the State should own every biscuit factory or every corner shop, but because it should provide everything that was necessary for there to be biscuit factories and corner shops.

Most people think this. In fact, most people just know it, as we just know that we are not 21.17 per cent better off than we were in October 2021. Last month's Retail Price Index rate of inflation was 6.1 per cent. In October 2022, that rate was 14.2 per cent. Can you feel the difference? An item costing £100 in October 2021, cost £114.20 in October 2022, and cost £121.17 in October 2023. While it is good to have this confirmed, we all knew it, anyway.

But oh, for a Minister for Common Sense, since no party understands any of this. Still, when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.