“The kite refuses to learn from the dove
Who stitches the grass for food with his beak
---- It’s not the kite’s way
His nature is to fly with hawk-eyes above
The trees with their nests in order to seek
---- Other birds’ new-born prey!”
From The Prayer-book of Rosemary Marlowe, by Bachchoo
All political parties -- though perhaps not those in Russia and China -- have internal wars. The UK’s two ruling parties have recently experienced fresh internal battles.
Scotland’s ruling Scottish National Party replaced its long-standing First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, with a “continuity candidate” Humza Yousaf, who narrowly defeated his two rivals. One promise of his campaign was his support for the bill on transgender rights that the Scottish Assembly had passed under Nicola Sturgeon. The bill gives any Scot the right to assert which gender he or she belongs to, regardless of the one they were born with. When that bill was passed, Hedgie Sunak said, as PM of the United Kingdom, that he was nullifying it. Humza has now promised to take the UK government’s cancellation of the Scottish bill to court.
The division is not simply between Hedgie and Humza. The two candidates whom Humza defeated and their followers, 48 per cent of the membership of the SNP, also oppose his legal challenge. The issue will inevitably lead to a precipitous division, a fall in the popularity of the SNP and to electoral gains for Scottish Labour.
Then coming south, this last week witnessed a fresh battle in the ruling Tory Party. Baroness Warsi, a former co-chair of the Tory Party, has criticised home secretary Suella “Cruella” Braverman for using “racist rhetoric” repeatedly and has warned that her conduct should be regarded as unacceptable.
Speaking on Britain’s LBC radio station, Lady Warsi said: “I think the Prime Minister has to get a really strong message that this kind of rhetoric, whether it’s on small boats, whether it’s the stuff she was saying on the weekend which is not based on evidence, not nuanced, not kind of explanatory in any way… it has got to stop!”
Sayeeda Warsi comes from a Pakistani background and her last remark alludes to Cruella characterising Pakistani men as having different cultural values from those of Britain, a difference which, Cruella said, has led them to participate in paedophile grooming gangs.
The earlier allusion is to Cruella characterising people, who risk their lives to get away from war zones, famine and persecution to cross the English Channel and seek asylum, as “invaders”.
Lady Warsi didn’t pull her punches. She told the widely read Daily Mirror: “I genuinely felt that with Rishi Sunak becoming Prime Minister that we were going to return to some level of grown-up politics. I just think that the home secretary keeps dragging him back into the gutter.”
Of course, Warsi wants her party to stay in power, and so she adds: “We need to make it clear that this isn’t going to be our strategy for the next eighteen months -- racist rhetoric and rabble rousing.”
But does Sayeedaji really think that Hedgie wants “to make this clear”? Is she, despite being a baroness, politically naïve? Hedgie included Cruella in his Cabinet, despite her having been compelled to resign the post only a week earlier for a breach of parliamentary procedure involving security. And any home secretary is in charge -- wait for it -- of the nation’s – errr -- security???
So why, Hedgie, why? Because, gentle reader, Cruella was once chair of the 70-strong Tory MPs’ group called European Research Group (ERG). This is an almost surrealistically right-wing gang of people who do no research but are Brexiteers, and who are now threatening to destabilise Hedgie’s government if they don’t get their absurd way on all issues.
This last week junior doctors throughout the nation went on a four-day strike. It caused untold disruption in the National Health Service. These doctors are the most impoverished professionals in the country, and yet health minister Steve Baker and his boss Hedgie haven’t the tiniest clue as to how to grant, even partially, their demands or, relatedly, how to save the NHS, which is in serious decline.
Instead, Hedgie chooses to resort to Cruella’s racist rhetoric and rabble-rousing policies of sending handfuls of asylum seekers to Rwanda. Hedgie is well aware that attacking the boat people, with any of the sort of language that Lady Warsi finds revolting, will at least keep some hard-core Tory voters on his side.
Cruella’s possibly most outrageous decision was to attack the Essex police this week for responding to calls to remove fifteen “Golliwog” dolls from a pub in Essex. The owners of the White Hart Inn, Christopher Riley and his wife Bernice, had decorated the pub with the dolls -- insulting caricatures of black people being suspended by the neck from ceiling height behind the bar of the pub. Riley posted a picture of two of these on the social media with the comment: “They used to hang them in Mississippi years ago”.
Responding to complaints of hate crime, the police removed them. Cruella waded in, not to attack the openly and proudly racist Rileys, but to attack the police who responded to the call.
It turns out that Riley, whose other posts on the social media have been exposed as openly racist, is a member of the “Suella Braverman Supporters Group” on Facebook.
That’s the company this Tory PM Hedgie keeps.
