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Rishi Sunak: The UK's failed extremist

He would be dangerous, if he wasn’t so useless

nickcohen.substack.com

British exceptionalism means that we do not like to think of our politicians as extremists. Official paranoia, state-sponsored lying, half-mad ideas that play to bigoted prejudices: these evils do not afflict dear, sweet, safe old Blighty.

You need only glance at the press or watch the BBC to know that policies and politicians we would have no problem identifying as radical right if they appeared in Europe or the Trumpian corners of the United States, are treated as mainstream here in the UK.

To be fair, Rishi Sunak is not a typical strongman leader. He is small (5ft 5in) and without physical presence, oratorical skill, or a definable sense of purpose.

Sunak’s manner varies from  wide-eyed chirpiness when discussing his strangely marginal political passions – banning smoking, recruiting more maths teachers – to petulance when confronted with difficulties: “He comes across as snippy, and comes across as thin-skinned — which he is, when people challenge him,” said one former minister.

Labour politicians believe he will fall apart under the scrutiny of a general election campaign.

And yet this mediocre member of the superrich (our modern Malvolio married rather than earned his wealth) who received the best education the Western world can offer at Winchester college and Oxford and Stanford universities, is by any reasonable definition an extremist.

Sunak’s only saving grace is that he is as useless at extremism as he is at everything else and thus there is a limit to how much damage he can cause.

Within the past few hours Sunak passed into law the power to send asylum seekers to the quasi-dictatorship of Rwanda. The deportees will include genuine refugees, the victims of human trafficking, and Afghans who risked their lives serving the British armed forces in the war against the Taliban.

I have no doubt that radical right politicians across Europe would like to possess the same powers. But as things stand only Rishi Sunak has them and is able to set them to the Orwellian task of remoulding reality.

The UK Supreme Court ruled that the government could not deport people to Rwanda because it is not a safe country. It’s a quasi-dictatorship under Paul Kagame, a genuine and genuinely frightening strongman, who is engaged in covert warfare against neighbouring states. There’s no real judicial independence and the Rwandan government breached the terms of a previous asylum deal it had entered into with Israel.

The UK government has got round these objections by announcing that reality is now what Rishi Sunak says it is.

Sunak’s legislation declares that Rwanda is a safe country, even though it isn’t. From now on, an asylum seeker trying to stop the UK deporting him cannot use the actual existing repressions on the ground in Rwanda to challenge the government in UK courts.

Sunak says Rwanda is safe so it must be so. Maybe Sunak will move on to declare that black is white and 2+2=5, but for the time being he is limiting himself to creating an imaginary African republic where all is peace and light.

Lord Anderson, who as a former adviser to the UK state on terrorism is hardly a knee-jerk softie, put it well when he said of the government’s plans to end judicial oversight

“If Rwanda is safe as the government would have us declare, it has nothing to fear from such scrutiny. “Yet we are invited to adopt a fiction, to wrap it in the cloak of parliamentary sovereignty and to grant it permanent immunity from challenge. To tell an untruth and call it truth.”

To insist that lies are the truth is extreme. It is also the logical conclusion of the Brexit policy of concerted lying in the service of political ends, which has been running since 2016.

And speaking of Brexit and before I go any further, I should note that, with the exception of Geert Wilders, no European far-right leader advocates taking his or her country out of the EU. But Rishi Sunak was all for Brexit, and promised that “our nation would be freer, fairer and more prosperous outside the EU”.

We know how that went.

And we almost certainly know how the Rwanda deportations will go. They will fail, and Sunak will be a failed extremist because what he wants is impossible.

Look at it from the point of view of a right-winger who is furious that tens of thousands are crossing the English Channel and entering the country illegally. Throughout his life the Conservatives have betrayed him.  

David Cameron promised to reduce migration from the hundreds to tens of thousands, and failed to deliver. Brexit promised to return control of our borders. Instead, small boats cross the channel in a parody of the Dunkirk evacuation, while legal immigration has gone through the roof.

No pro-European politician would ever say this, but it does not mean that people have not noticed. By leaving the EU, the UK swapped European migrants who were largely white and, if they had a religion, it was Christianity, for migrants from the rest of the world who are largely not white and, if they have a religion, it is unlikely to be Christianity.

Despite all this Sunak is still bellowing that he will stop all the boats, which is as impossible as David Cameron’s fake promise to reduce migration to the tens of thousands.

He is bellowing because Conservatives are terrified that Reform (the latest Farage party) will send the Tories down to a landslide defeat.

They are trying to unite the right by assuming that right-wing and radical-wing voters are stupid, and won’t notice the attempt to con them with impossible promises.

It’s not working. At the moment we are in an unprecedented situation, where Labour enjoys a poll lead on immigration.

For those on left who say there is no difference between Starmer’s Labour and the Tories ought to notice that Labour holds that lead even though it is absolutely opposed to the Rwanda obscenity, when Tony Blair’s Labour party would probably have gone along with it.

In the Commons yesterday, Stephen Kinnock, Labour’s shadow immigration minister, tore into the government.

He pointed out that the cost of the vain attempt to save Sunak’s skin – will be about “£2 million per deportee”. As only a few hundred are ever likely to go, tens of thousands more will be left “in expensive hotels, stuck in a perma-backlog at a staggering cost to the taxpayer.”

Assuming, that is, anyone goes at all.

 Yesterday Sunak made a rather pathetic admission that no plane will leave for 12 weeks. We shall see. Despite the government’s best efforts to rewrite the law and threaten the European Court of Human Rights, there can still be legal challenges which may last until the next election.

Cynics say the government would like nothing better than the flights to be stopped so it can blame left-wing lawyers in the campaign. I think they are attributing intelligence to the prime minister he does not possess.

Put like this, the UK’s failed extremists do not seem so reprehensible.  But look at what they have done. Since David Cameron in 2010 they have never explained the necessity for immigration in an honest conversation with the public.

They have pandered to right-wing and radical right-wing sentiment and then infuriated voters by making promises they could never keep. In doing so they have prepared the ground for genuinely extremist politicians.

We have already paid a price for their trickery with Brexit and I doubt the full bill is in yet.

We are fortunate that Rishi Sunak is too hopeless to be dangerous. We may not be so lucky in the future.