Fascism has long had a reputation for being the sort of last resort where only white, male, incompetents may frolic, gaily lopping off hard-won freedoms while crushing millions beneath their jackboot.
But when wielded by Suella Braverman, the very same ideas become the sort of thing discussed in all seriousness by newspapers and at dinner tables where, were it to be uttered by a moustachioed short-arse in a home-made uniform, it would be regarded with disgust.
Today, a woman who not five minutes ago was in government with the job of forcing everyone to obey the law, says government shouldn't have to if it doesn't feel like it.
Despite being fired for a combination of insubordination, stupidity, and failure, Braverman daily demands to be heard, because these days it seems any mad fool can become a dictator. So, let's hear her out.
It looks like we're not allowed to ignore her (Andy Stenning/Sunday Mirror)Having vowed to stop the small boats daily bringing what we know to be almost-entirely genuine refugees across the Channel, she came up with a plan to send them to Rwanda, blew £140million on it, and if she hadn't already been fired when the Supreme Court ripped it to shreds as the most illegal and appalling thing since Boris Johnson tried to shut down Parliament, then she'd have been defenestrated like Hans Gruber at the end of Die Hard.
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For some reason, not being in post while your flagship policy is ruled unworkable b*llocks, and you're hawked onto the backbenches like a grolly that took a year to budge, has given her the impression that she knows how to fix it. Her big idea is for Parliament to pass a law saying it can ignore 800 years of custom and precedent and no longer has to check its homework with anyone.
"Now is not the time to waste energy on a post mortem of how we got here," said the woman who got us here, and wants us to move on rapidly to Plan B. "There must be no more magical thinking," declared Princess Tippy Toes The Caring Clever Genius Who Came Up With Plan A.
She says that if judges "can't be certain Rwanda will abide by the terms of any new treaty", then the obvious thing to do is.... move the Border Force and asylum judges to Kigali. I wish I was joking, really I do. But that's her actual plan. Sod Calais, lads, it'll be so much more expensive and pointless to "embed UK observers and independent reviewers of asylum decisions" in the same African state where the Supreme Court LITERALLY JUST SAID NO-ONE WAS SAFE.
Oh, all the LOLZ (PA)But wait, there's more. She wants to entirely rebuild Rwanda's political and asylum system, which enables torture, disappearances and extra-judicial murder, in time for deportations to begin before the next general election, which is about 6 months the way things are going.
Then she wants to get Parliament back over the Christmas break - it's not like she has many friends there to lose at this stage - to debate emergency laws which "must exclude all avenues of legal challenge". Something something will of the people, who were last asked their opinion in 2019, 3 Prime Ministers and 6 Home Secretaries ago, on a manifesto which mentioned any of this drivel precisely zero times.
To make a law which bans lawyers from lawyering breaks every bit of the unwritten British constitution. It gives Parliament the right to be a tyranny, for MPs to be immune to the laws they pass or repeal for others, for those with no vote to be denied rights by those who weren't voted in to do that.
Braverman wants "the entirety of the Human Rights Act and European Convention on Human Rights ... including the Refugee Convention... disapplied". Britain would the first country to willingly leave the ECHR, and create a path by which those same laws could be "disapplied" to the rest of us.
Freedom of protest, speech, and the press - disapplied. The decriminalisation of homosexuality - disapplied. The right not to be discriminated against because of race, gender, age or orientation - disapplied. If Braverman gets her way, the government could once again enjoy the unfettered right to mass surveillance, discrimination, violence, and abuse of its people not seen on these shores since the Romans rocked up.
Of course if we left the ECHR, former Prime Ministers wouldn't be able to argue that providing their Whats Apps to a pandemic inquiry was a breach of their right to family life under Article 8. But if we left the international club of Countries That Aren't The World's Biggest Gits there'd be no more public inquiries to worry about.
Under Braverman's mad scheme, migrants would have the right to claim an exemption from being sent to Rwanda, "but Home Office decisions on these claims could not be challenged in court". So, effectively, there'd be no way out of an unlawful deportation to a country where continued existence depends on a flip of the coin. If you think this would only apply to them dirty migrants, think again - they decided Shamima Begum, a British girl born and bred, could be rendered stateless. They can do it to you, if they decide that YOUR plans, thoughts, phone calls, associations, are terrorism. Peaceniks, Suffragettes, and animal rights protesters have been labelled terrorists before now. Last year they wanted to call people terrorists if they walked down the road too slowly. When they come for "them", they come next for you.
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There is an upside - after some evolution forced on it by, er, the international human rights framework, fascism is now an equal opportunities infection, as likely to manifest in people of any colour, creed or persuasion, and it seems to have achieved the status of a protected characteristic. Ignoring it is notge allowed, cancelling it is a breach of freedom of speech (Article 10), discrimination (Article 14) and association (Article 11), while calling it fascism is probably a breach of freedom of thought (Article 9) and a form of torture (Article 3).
Braverman would have you believe that her plan is a one-off, an emergency, and only for people on boats. She'd also like you to believe she's a genius. Still, caring sharing wokery demands we give her a fair hearing. So let's try a pilot scheme: we disapply the Human Rights Act and Refugee Convention to all those in government first. We'll give it a year, see how they get on.
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