Arseholes

So the plane didn't take off, but it doesn't matter, because it's a wedge issue. God help us, this is how these people think.

Somewhat abstruse, as opening lines go, but then, the whole situation is. And it has got me despairing even more than usual as to what's become of us as a nation.

I shall clarify, the flight, of course, was Priti Patel's brainchild, the rendition of asylum seekers to Rwanda. I'm not going into that any further. If you feel anything but repugnance towards this racist, morally bankrupt, unworkable and ludicrously expensive pipe dream then, I beg of you, fuck off. Then fuck off some more.

No, this piece isn't to comment on the policy, it's nor even one of those "slow descent into fascism" bits which people are so fond of now, there's no point. It's self-evident. No, what this piece is about is the motivation, revealed in hindsight, of the racist, abhorrent, imbecilic and embarrassing piece of shit idea about putting some asylum seekers on a plane and then sending them off to a country where the human rights record isn't so much atrocious as it is non-existent.

It was crystallised today, as rumours swirl of a snap election in the wake of the Rwanda debacle, because, you see, it is a "wedge issue", and the PM is well pleased with how it turned out. It never mattered whether the plane took off or not, what matters is he's got a group of people to beat up. The European Court of Human Rights, "lefty lawyers", the judiciary, people who were just doing their jobs. Indeed, the plane staying on the tarmac is probably the best of all possible outcomes; See, he says, pointing at the stationary plane, see what our enemies have done. And the racists get angry, and Johnson is reborn.

How he as chuckled at the frothing racists ringing into LBC, saying they're "incandescent with rage". How he's cheered, and leered as various columnists fulminate against the ECHR, and demand that we withdraw from it. The ECHR! That Churchill set up! That only Russia has withdrawn from! Are you people for real?

What is so upsetting about this isn't just the cynicism, though that's bad enough, and it isn't just that Johnson and Patel are perfectly prepared to ruin lives, actual human lives, in order to chuck some red meat to the baying mob, and maybe cling on a little longer, I would expect nothing else of them.

No, what's infuriating, heart-breaking, astonishing is that they do all this and it gets treated as though it were perfectly normal. It's being reported as a piece of strategy, all part of some great game. A good result, it's "energised the base". It is not. It is actual people's actual lives. The same report said that Johnson was "in King Kong mode", as though frantically spewing out half-baked, divisive and frankly plain fucking evil ideas were in some way a meritorious stratagem. Getting back to Brexit, fighting on ground he knows well.

When it's reported that this horror of an idea is part of some plan, and there is no backlash to that, then I truly do wonder what has become of us. The basic lack of decency, of feeling for your fellow man, of any sort of moral compass involved in blandly commenting upon this as though it were a clever tactical switch, and not the deliberate visiting of misery upon those who've already suffered plenty, that's what I can't get over.

Arseholes. The lot of them.