Originally published at: U.K. faces prospect of fourth prime minister in 18 months as Conservative Party turns once again on own leader | Boing Boing
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I mean… maybe there should be some elections sometime? Of course, I’m not sure that Labor is much better right now, but… 
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They’re going to pick Braverman, won’t they.
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The Tory Party is indistinguishable from the Valley of Spiders in King Kong; a seething pit of vile carrion crawlers.
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I think that, like the Dems; Labour only has to be sane in order to separate themselves from the death cult on the other side of the house.
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I feel like I’m missing something here. Why do they want to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda? Just general cruelty and creepiness?
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The short answer is yes. The long one is yes as well.
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I know that predictions are false, that accellerationism and similar ideas are the worst, but “Prime Minister Suella Braverman” really is deliciously suggestive of insane electoral maps where the Scottish National Party loses Scotland while winning the opposition bench in Westminster.
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Firstly, you should note that they are no longer ‘asylum seekers’ but ‘illegal immigrants’. The Tory scum already passed laws that say any entry to the UK without permission is illegal. Claim your asylum before getting here (except that the Tories have removed all methods for doing so) and if you come from a safe country (99% of them now arrive on ‘small boats’ from France) then claim asylum there.
Why Rwanda? They wanted to emulate the Australian model and in Rwanda they found a country dumb/greedy/corrupt enough to take their money. They claim the threat of deportation to Rwanda will entirely deter all those in small boats and destroy the people-smugglers’ business model.
They have now spent or will spend some £290m on Rwanda. They spent (IIRC) of the order of £65m with the French to deter and intercept the small boats before they leave France. Can you see their priorities here? (Something about cruelty and the point.)
Meanwhile UK’s legal migration numbers ballooned to in excess of 700k per year for the first time and the small boats 'invaders’ (TM Suella Braverman - dumb as a brick and very, very nasty, but for whom it is all a performance to get the leadership) are IIRC less than 20k (or of that order of magnitude).
Basically, it is all performative blue wall appeal to the lowest common denominator economically oppressed voters with some red meat rhetoric. And his decision to bring small boats front and centre, together with Rwanda (he inherited the Rwanda policy and could have quietly dropped it like he dropped other policies he inherited from Boris Johnson) means that his downfall, either personally before an election, or politically as a result of the next election, is entirely all of his own making.
This is a man who is basically a banking technocrat and who is utterly useless at politics - even the kind his party pursues. The people who are against immigration (‘taking our jobs and houses and using our NHS, etc’ won’t be mollified by a few dozen people ending up in Rwanda, if they ever do.
ETA, that said, about Rish! Sunakered (copyright John Crace of The Guardian whose take-downs of the PM are a regular fillip), and his political incompetence, the Tory party is now unleadable. A leader would have to have a magic touch (guaranteed election success prospects, like Johnson used to have, but probably now does not) to get any consensus among the rabble of right-wing fuckwits and vaguely sensible ‘one nation’ Tories and all the other factions. Brexit is the root cause of most of the issues they all disagree about - of our ballooning legal immigration, of economic woes, and so on. When ‘one nation’ Johnson expelled all the sensible centrists from the party when they voted against his dumb Brexit bill, he set the scene for exactly what has happened since and is happening today within the party. The hope is that they will fracture. The one thing Tories have always been best at is unity - not any more. But they may manage it if the alternative is political armageddon. Sunak’s selection of Rwanda as the hill to die on probably brings us close to their political armageddon. OTOH, Farage is definitely eyeing up the option of joining, getting a safe seat after the election and taking over. It’s a toss-up whether the rightish voters will flock to him (like they did to Johnson, a man with similar charm and swagger) or avoid him like the plague.
Hmm - probably time to take this over to the UK politcs thread, once I’ve calmed down. 
(Various edits to clarify/disambiguate.)
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I don’t know… maybe, but it also seems like the current Labor leadership has done a much worse job of listening to their left flank of the party… they seemed to have doubled down on the Blairite middle way bullshit, at the expense of vulnerable groups (trans folks, immigrants, etc). Meanwhile, while certainly not perfect, Biden has given the progressive wing of the party some wins here.
I’m not in the UK, of course, so I could be wrong, but that’s the sense I’ve been getting in reading comments here or over the UK politics thread…
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I’m not sure why Rwanda specifically got the nod over any other roughly similar countries(if anyone does know I’d be curious); but I think the intention is a destination that counts as ‘safe 3rd country’ rather than ‘refoulment’; while being unattractive enough that it eliminates the incentive to migrate for economic reasons.
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Thank you – that’s genuinely extremely informative! 
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See my previous post, but Braverman spent a long time shopping around the globe before she found a taker in Rwanda (when she was in office).
ETA and by the way - and this is delicious - Jenrick and Braverman etc want Sunak to go further in his proposed bill - the one he may lose a vote on and perhaps his job over. The ‘further’ that they want is things that Rwanda - even Rwanda! - has signalled it would not find acceptable, as they would be too far beyond proper legal frameworks. That’s why Jenrick resigned, the bill was too ‘soft’. He’s another bland Tory who rose without trace and would do and say whatever he was told by whatever leader was in office, until he realised that the real money and future were in moving towards right-wing fuckwittery.
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They are deliberately ignoring and shunning the Corbynite left, which they regard as rotten with antisemites hiding behind a figleaf of anti-Zionism and pro-Palestinian sentiment. They want to demonstrate that Labour is a safe place for Jews and solidly pro-Israel.
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Unless, of course, that Jewish person is also critical of Israel…
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Yes, Jews who don’t support Israel are not considered to be part of the mainstream Jewish community that they want to reassure.
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Hence the problem. No one deserves to be targeted for their religion or ethnicity, and that should include Jews who might not share the same views on Israel and its policies. I mean, is there a “right” way to be Jewish that labor gets to dictate?
And of course, there is the transphobia problem in the labor party, too.
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My thoughts about the current Labour leadership are summed up in this gif:
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That’s but one part of Starmer’s entire, bland “do not scare ANY horses at all to get elected” positioning. (There’s a long list of fearful horses he is trying not to scare and the Jewish horse is one of many.)
He may well succeed with it, in getting elected, but he may also fail to inspire enough people to care if they see no real benefit from a prospective Labour government other than ‘not the Tories’. I sometimes wonder if that really is, deliberately, all he is relying on.
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