The government have made me hate myself. Even more than usual. I've poddled along most of my existence with the same healthy level of self-loathing of your average middle-class failure, but the last ten years have ramped it up to levels which no mortal man can stand for long without requiring some form of recreational outlet. I felt it happening again, when the news of their utterly batshit, ridiculously cynical, completely unworkable, massively illegal and completely and utterly morally reprehensible "send all the refugees to Rwanda" wheeze broke. Despite all my best intentions to the contrary, I couldn't help but get swept up in the denunciations. I'm sorry. I tried hard not to.
There is a very long list of charges which can be laid at the door of this current administration, and I'll be the first to admit that this particular complaint is a long way down the list, but I must recognise that they truly have turned me into an out and out bore, the sort of bloke who you will do frankly anything to avoid getting buttonholed by in conversation. Worse yet, the sort of bloke who blogs about it.
I was always that way inclined, of course. A man with an inflated sense of his own intellect and a startling lack of shame about trumpeting his half-baked opinions (I know, I should have been a columnist, I'd fit right in), but the clusterfuck upon shitstorm upon omnishambles of the last few years has really baked it in.
So when I first heard about this completely ludicrous Rwanda idea, I bit. I shouldn't have. It's such patent nonsense that I can't see it working at all. It is so blatantly racist, so clearly designed to churn up a bit of hatred, as Johnson, the contemptible worm that he is, looks to save his political skin on the backs of the world's most disadvantaged that it should be safely ignored. It can't work. But so regular have been the outrages from this administration that it is, by now, almost a reflexive action.
What angers me about this is that, in reacting, I'm playing the game. I'm contributing to the discourse, I'm actively helping to stoke division. But, in not reacting, I'm helping to allow an historically bad policy to be considered acceptable. It's a bugger, I can tell you.
I am aware of the counter-argument to this position, and it's a good one. Very simply, who gives a monkey's what I think? A reasonable position to take, but I've thought about this and I think the answer is pretty simple. I care. I care what I think.
Because the thing I cannot bear is the idea of becoming inured to the venality, the criminality, the bigotry, the corruption. I can't bear the idea of just shrugging and saying "well, they're all like that". They're not all like that. And this is not normal.
What the Johnson administration has done is the same thing that the Trump administration attempted. It's normalised craziness, normalised shamelessness, and our political systems have proved remarkably incapable of dealing with it. Worse yet, we've allowed ourselves to imagine that this is totally normal. This is how its always been.
It's not. It isn't.
His position was untenable if he was fined, until he was fined, and then it was fine. The usual suspects do the media rounds, knowing that all they have to do is wait out the eight minutes of the interview slot and the news cycle will move on. If he's fined again, fine, we'll just lump some other monstrous policy onto the front pages and get everyone arguing about that.
And, in case I've not made my position clear, the idea of shunting asylum seekers off to Rwanda to be processed is one of the biggest, steamingest piles of shit policy I've ever seen, designed purely to appeal to the worst instincts in human nature, it's staggeringly horrible. I genuinely can't believe that even this lot came up with it. Its unconscionable, and also, probably, unworkable, which only adds to the breathtaking cynicism of the whole exercise. To hear Johnson and Patel talk about "lefty lawyers" as if they, too, were a tabloid leader column is to understand how debased our discourse has become, how little respect for the rule of law this sham, criminal administration actually has. They think and govern in soundbites. Their instincts are petty and mean.
And this anger, I feel, is important. It's important not to get jaded, not to let them grind you down with outrage after outrage. Because each fresh hell is a new fight, and yeah, I'm probably going to bore on about it. I'm really sorry.
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