[Bones McCoy]

If Sewagella is really a Buddhist, I dread to think what she’ll come back as next time round

Suella Braverman, most likely.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

An asylum seeker...

[kreuzberger]

On that basis, Sadist Sue is royally fucked. The smart money is still on the bluebottle.

[satnav]

I'm loving how all the right wing pundits on Twitter and GB News are all claiming that Suella is the only politician capable of dealing with the immigration situation yet none of these pundits can actually point to anything that she has actually achieved while she has been in government.

[RedSparrows]

It's the natural state for them. All their 'must do something', 'man/woman of action', 'just saying what you're thinking', etc is just blather. That's it. Absolutely meaningless, self-consolling blather. It's utter bullshit.

Tories been in power for 12 years.
Effective (let alone effective AND HUMANE FFS) treatment of immigration has never been on the cards
They have repeatedly shown not to care/not be bothered/exploit the situation
Their media parrots have repeatedly said 'we need a debate' / 'we need a solution, only tough Tories can do that'
Round and round and round
There is no discussion, anywhere, from them of ACTUAL facts on the ground in the round, NOTHING on what would constitute an effective policy other than 'point guns at them and crow about how virtuous we are for not firing them'.

They're all absolute fucking degenerate bastards.

Ahem.

[Yug]

Is anyone surprised by this?

The government is putting 2.6 million EU citizens at risk of detention or removal from the country by the Home Office, the high court has heard.

The claim was made at a judicial review of the Home Office’s implementation of the part of the withdrawal agreement guaranteeing the rights of about 6 million EU citizens living in the country before Brexit.

Mr Justice Lane was told that the Home Office’s rules contain a “fundamental feature” which threatens the right of a person to live, work, retire or get access to healthcare.

The case is being brought by the Independent Monitoring Authority, a statutory body set up to protect the rights of EU citizens settled in the country before Brexit...

https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... ourt-hears

Even those who are here legally are at risk

[Abernathy]

The entire party seems beholden to the same 50-60 extreme eurosceptic headbangers.

This is a fascinating, horrifying, and, for the Tories, perennial phenomenon. It's largely been the case ever since John Major's tenure, when he famously called them "the bastards", and, to his credit, attempted to face them down by resigning as Tory leader and telling them to "put up or shut up". It's probably fair to say that they were more safely marginalised then than they are now.

To me, there seems to be a clear parallel with Labour's Socialist Campaign Group. Now safely marginalised to irrelevancy on the fringe of the party again, in very recent memory the Campaign Group actually succeeded in taking over the Labour Party, to the detriment of literally everybody, by managing to elect one of their number as leader of the party in the period that will forever be known to history as the Jeremy Corbyn Nightmare.

The ERG operates in exactly the same way, by getting high-profile wing-nuts like Braverman and Truss into key positions. The difference now, thanks to 12 years of Tory hegemony, is that these fuckers are now in actual governmental positions.

The Tories do, I feel, finally need to get to grips with this problem and follow Labour's example by taking action to excise or otherwise neutralise the ERG from their party if they are to make any sort of political recovery from the swamp of shite they've dropped themselves into.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Completely agree, but the key difference between the Labour nightmare and the Tory one is that Corbyn never had the wholehearted support of the party membership - seen in the way the pendulum swung back so swiftly after he had gone. The ERG are moderates compared to much of the membership - as we saw in the election of Surgical.

[Abernathy]

Corbyn was successful in boosting Labour's membership up to around 500,000, but it was at the cost of welcoming into the party assorted, Trots, Tankies, and various fanatics from other sects, many of whom were accustomed to, shall we say, a rather porous relationship between legitimate criticism of the state of Israel and rank, hateful and full-blooded anti-semitism. It was therefore somewhat ironic that the problem of anti-semitism within the Labour Party that played a substantial part in Corbyn's eventual downfall was in effect grossly exacerbated by Corbyn's own leadership.

[Andy McDandy]

They also didn't seem to get that politics is as much about persuading your opponents as your friends. Telling anyone not 100% in line with you to fuck off isn't a great way of winning support.

[Arrowhead]

To me, there seems to be a clear parallel with Labour's Socialist Campaign Group.

This is a very good point. I dread to think how shambolic things would be for Labour right now if there were 50-60 Corbynite hardliners coalesced into a single group on the backbenches, essentially a party-within-a-party à la the ERG. There weren't exactly many good things to come out of GE2019 for Labour, but dodging that particular bullet was one of them. The party would've been almost unleadable.

As things stand right now, I want the next election to either deliver either i) a Labour landslide so big you could see it from space, or ii) a hung parliament with Labour in some form of coalition with the Lib Dems. A very narrow election victory would deliver the balance of power to the likes of Burgon, Long-Bailey etc. and I'm convinced their priority would simply be to make life as difficult as possible for PM Starmer, to the detriment of everything else.

[mattomac]

Problem was where most of the Labour MPs stuck it out in the belief this would change and finally got their disastrous result they expected (taking out ironically far more of the left than the right), the Tories haven’t, they blame Major for the reason they tanked but it’s beyond that, the fact no one trusted them until a global economic crisis allowed them to just about get into power says a lot.

2010 is an interesting election, it was for a long time my default position (or best outcome) but flipped, Corbyn probably does work in some way to some but Labour have evidently moved on and those who have switched (more than a sizeable amount and more currently that what Blair took) will not be won back with that. The 2019 election was so bad it reset the whole thing. I think we had entered a period where sizeable majorities had ended but Labour opened the door for one last one.

Funnily enough the Tories believe that the argument won on that is the argument won on everything else, and it simply is not.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... riti-patel

Marina vs Suella. No contest.

Suella Braverman is an extremely low-calibre secretary of state. She’s not the sort of person you put in charge of anything you actually want to fix. Oh, she’s most definitely a mood/a vibe/a pose. She may be very good at positioning herself as a populist – but operationally, she’s toxic, and about as much use as getting Ralph Wiggum to do something. Her sole previous cabinet experience was as Boris Johnson’s attorney general, a role with all the prestige of being Donald Trump’s STD doctor. Or, indeed, Donald Trump’s attorney general.

Jonathan Gullis, the missing link between the vegetable and mineral kingdoms who moonlights as a Stoke MP

The unfortunate lesson of the past six years in politics is that standards can always get worse, and if anything could make you nostalgic for Priti Patel, it’s the advent of Braverman.

Braverman will fail in the same way, because – as discussed here before – “annoying all the right people” is not a programme for government. It’s a perfectly adequate professional philosophy to have if you’re gnashing your veneers on GB News, but it doesn’t deliver policy and it doesn’t even approximate to professional competence.

In fact, as the country’s economic prospects get darker and grimmer, I fear it would be the point at which she was only just getting started.

It'd be even funnier if it wasn't sadly true.

[Oboogie]

Well this is interesting.
The only reason Johnson isn't PM now is because he didn't want the job.
Therefore Sunak was unopposed and had no need to offer Braverman a cabinet post at all.

"Boris Johnson had backing to challenge Rishi Sunak, Sir Graham Brady confirms"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63503932

[Spoonman]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... riti-patel

Marina vs Suella. No contest.

Awfully harsh on Ralph Wiggum there. He's definitely not the kind of person who'd publicly get off at personally sending off asylum seekers on a plane direct to Rwanda, that's for sure.

[Yug]

It's not just the rozzers who need to sort out their vetting process

Home Office contractors have been disciplined after trying to sell illegal drugs to asylum seekers at the crisis-hit processing centre at Manston in Kent.

It is understood the issue came to light after asylum seekers at the site in Ramsgate complained that security staff had tried to sell them cannabis. Security guards also raised concerns that their colleagues were smoking the drug while on duty....

https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... lum-centre

There is something very rotten at the heart of the Home Office.

[Crabcakes]

Well this is interesting.
The only reason Johnson isn't PM now is because he didn't want the job.
Therefore Sunak was unopposed and had no need to offer Braverman a cabinet post at all.

"Boris Johnson had backing to challenge Rishi Sunak, Sir Graham Brady confirms"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63503932

Hmm. What’s interesting here is that only Brady has those numbers. So what better way to keep the PM in line with the real power in the party than remind him he wouldn’t even be PM now if the 1922 hadn’t had a word with Cincinnatus redux?

[Abernathy]

I still don't believe Johnson really had the numbers.

[Bones McCoy]

It's not just the rozzers who need to sort out their vetting process

Home Office contractors have been disciplined after trying to sell illegal drugs to asylum seekers at the crisis-hit processing centre at Manston in Kent.

It is understood the issue came to light after asylum seekers at the site in Ramsgate complained that security staff had tried to sell them cannabis. Security guards also raised concerns that their colleagues were smoking the drug while on duty....

https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... lum-centre

There is something very rotten at the heart of the Home Office.

When they say "Home office Contractors", they mean "Subcontracted freelance security staff".

[Bones McCoy]

I still don't believe Johnson really had the numbers.

Neither do I.

Brady's statement is nothing but bullshit from the nation's leading bullshit factory.