The typhoon in a teaspoon rages on unabated as the BBC and right dominated Media obsess in a relentless feeding frenzy over fantisemitism, with their determination to demonize and destroy an honest man who has dedicated his life to equality and global peace, for making a truthful statement! Meanwhile the Tories play by a different set of rules as they remain totally unaccountable, despite the grave seriousness of their repeated retched conduct, constant lawless abuse of high office and reckless squandering of public funds. Determined to set new precedents for functioning above the law, it certainly does not help that Starmer, Captain of Capitulation, offers no opposition and saves his venom for his noble predecessor. This corrupt Tory Government’s disgracefully dismissive approach to accountability is amply demonstrated in the Skwawkbox Article entitled, “Exclusive: Johnson will let Patel off after bullying report – because he ‘takes a different view’ on conduct code and blames civil service for her behaviour.”
The Skwawlbox report that, “Home Secretary Priti Patel is under pressure after an investigation into a ‘tsunami’ of accusations of bullying found her guilty of breaches of the ministerial code in her behaviour toward staff – but the media have been speculating that Johnson will let her off the hook, even though breaches of the ministerial code of conduct are supposed to result in resignation or sacking.” They reveal that, “a circular from the Permanent Secretary to senior civil servants, seen by the Skwawkbox, confirms that Johnson is going to keep Patel in her post, because he blames the civil service for her behaviour and doesn’t think the code of conduct says what it says. The circular tells the PSs that: The prime minister takes a different view on the Code of Conduct and that the Patel situation happened because of: shortcomings in civil service leadership. Presumably the civil servants didn’t kowtow sufficiently deeply or tug their forelocks hard enough.”
Skwawkbox criticize how, “The Tories’ complete contempt for democracy, good governance and public servants – and their love for avoiding accountability by blaming subordinates – comes to the fore yet again.” But this is hardly a report about one or two isolated incidents; Patel has a strong track record for bullying and abuse in all three of her pas Ministerial assignments and it seems this is just one aspect of her significant character flaws. According to the Canary Article entitled, “Priti Patel might be a bully, but she’s also so much worse than that,” they contend, “If the allegations are to be believed, then Priti Patel, “intentionally” or not, is a bully.” While they agree, “that’s terrible, it truly is, but given everything we know about her, should we be surprised?” They say not and “argue that bullying civil servants is at the lesser end of her faults. The only surprising thing is that people in the media expected her to lose her job given the behaviour that put her there in the first place.”
Patel is not a nice character and her actions demonstrate an underlying streak of cruelty; so the Home Office was a perfect place for Johnson to place her, to ruthlessly get tough on crime and brutally abuse the rights of helpless Asylum seeking refugees. Under the ominous heading, “The life and should-be-crimes of Priti Patel,” the Canary report on how, “Gal-dem put together a handy guide to Patel’s greatest misdeeds/atrocities. Before her career in politics, Patel worked as a spin doctor on behalf of British American Tobacco (BAT). If you’re unfamiliar with tobacco, it’s a plant that, when smoked, causes: Addiction; Impotence; Death. If that wasn’t bad enough, tobacco companies actually charge their victims for the pleasure of being slowly made impotent/dead. If that wasn’t bad enough, Patel got paid hundreds of thousands to improve BAT’s image after its ‘joint venture with one of the world’s most brutal military regimes’.”
The Canary highlight, “Her lax attitude towards dubious foreign powers continued in office. Most notably, Theresa May had to fire her as international development secretary in 2017 because Patel was conducting secret meetings with Israeli ministers and business people. Given her record as development secretary, we can assume she wasn’t there solely to regale them with stories of how she spun the enrichment of a military dictatorship. Speaking on her time in the role, gal-dem wrote:
• Priti leveraged an £11bn aid budget as a trade incentive to make business deals with other countries in time for Brexit. It is illegal for the UK to explicitly use aid funds in this way, but that didn’t stop the former IDS from using the government funds to ‘further national interest’.
• Her legacy as IDS also includes using the same money to support big business and the comfortable middle class in foreign countries. She funnelled hundreds of millions of pounds worth of the UK’s aid budget into corporate ventures. This includes setting up five-star luxury hotels and shopping malls in Nigeria and investing in Chinese online gambling and restaurant chains.”
Focusing on the most controversial, the Canary list, “A collection of other positions she’s held in office include: Voting against same-sex marriage in 2013. Voting ‘against banning the detention of pregnant women’. Supporting the death penalty to ‘deter crime’. She later backtracked on this position – possibly because she found out how we historically dealt with those who collude with foreign powers. Recently, Patel has made waves as the home secretary, although thankfully not literally. The Bond-villain-esque proposals she’s considered include: Using wave-making pumps to splash refugees back to France. Erecting floating walls in the middle of the sea. Shipping people 4,000 miles away to a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean. While she avoided turning the English Channel into a vast murderscape that combined the worst elements of Waterworld and The Purge, the policies and rhetoric she’s enacted haven’t been much better. Largely they’ve revolved around failing to learn the lessons of Windrush.”
Patel’s ruthless enactment of the most toxic Tory policies clearly demonstrates her lack of humanity. The Canary report how she has, “also seen her waging war on the ‘lefty lawyers’ who had the nerve to expect her to obey the law. Make no mistake – the alleged bullying that Patel is accused of should have seen her fired. In any ordinary government it would have done, but this is no ordinary government. Patel isn’t in her position despite being a bully; she’s there because of it. When you employ a person to be Darth Vader, you don’t fire them because they were rude to the rebels. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t hammer the government for Johnson’s decision. It is to say that media types who ignore all of the above shouldn’t be surprised when Johnson ignores a code of conduct. Oh shit – did it ‘clearly say there must be no bullying’? It’s almost like these parasites have the same level of disdain for procedure as they do the human beings they want to wave to death in the English Channel.”
“Bully for them” the Canary cynically comment on how, “The establishment types weren’t horrified that Patel kept her job despite being a bully; they were horrified that she kept her job despite breaking a rule. This is where we are, though. We keep pointing out the horrible shit the Tories do, and the media keep acting like we’re the weirdoes for banging on about it. If you’re thinking, ‘well at least it will wake these people up’, it won’t. All it means is that the next time a minister makes a civil servant cry, Robert Peston will say something like: Ah, so although this sounds dubious, there is actually precedent for ministers behaving like a cross between Cruella de Vil and Joe Exotic. A month from now, the media will be back to normalising whatever nonsense Patel is up to. When that happens, remind yourself and everyone around you that Patel may be a bully, but like another infamous spin doctor, she’s also ‘so much worse than that’.”
In the Canary Article entitled, “Priti Patel is at the centre of another growing storm,” they tell of even more mayhem caused by this toxic aberrant Tory Minister who should have been removed from office. They say, “’Priti Patel is involved in yet another growing scandal. This time it involves the deportation of people to Jamaica right before Christmas. Sadly, this story is now becoming all too familiar’. In her generosity at this seasonal time of good will she has decided to tear more West Indian families apart with her cruel immigration policy crack down, they tell of yet ‘Another Jamaican deportation flight’.” Patel’s Christmas cruelty lnows no bounds! They say that, “The Morning Star reported that on 2 December the Home Office is planning to deport around eight people. It said that these included: fathers of young children and a man who has lived in the country since he was seven, according to campaigners.”
The Canary report that, “At least eight people have so far been booked onto the flight after they were detained and transferred to detention centres. Campaign group BARAC UK has started a petition. It’s calling on the Home Office to stop the flight. As of 11am on Sunday 22 November, over 147,000 people had signed it. Co-founder and national chair of BARAC UK Zita Holbourne told The Canary: We believe it is totally wrong to be deporting people to Jamaica in the middle of a pandemic and when the Windrush Lessons Learned recommendations have not yet been implemented. Most of those targeted for deportation have lived in the UK since they were small children. All their family are here and it’s the only home they know. Most of them have children. Also, recent research shows that there are huge psychological and lasting impacts of separation due to deportations on children.]”
The Canary highlights “Untold damage” saying, “The research Holbourne noted is from the organisation Bail for Immigration Detainees (BiD). It found that: mounting empirical research that has begun to document the short-and long-term effects of detention and deportation on children and families. BiD noted:
• “Physical separation in the case of deportation disrupts the essential secure base of a child, thereby risking internalizing symptoms (depression, anxiety) and externalizing behaviours (withdrawal, aggression)”.
• “Deportation leads to the abrupt loss of a familiar home environment and family structure. It can lead to family dissolution”.
• “Deportation is also associated with a loss of income, and numerous US studies show how this can lead to housing insecurity, food insecurity, psychological distress, and falling from low income into poverty”.
• “The experience of deportation produces increased emotional and behavioural distress among children and places children at risk of developing a range of disorders, such as sleeping disorders, depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder”.
• “The emotional effects are often compounded by successive traumatic experiences such as immigration raids and parental detention”.
“In addition the Canary report on the Pandemic implications. Holbourne also told The Canary that the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has made this deportation even more shocking. She said: In the middle of a pandemic, visiting is not permitted so families cannot even say goodbye. That this is happening just before Christmas will make it much worse for families in an already difficult year for us all. Black people are up to four times more likely to contract and die of coronavirus. So… [the Home Office] is putting people at risk and potentially spreading the virus by detaining them and taking them on long haul flights chained to two security guards. Holbourne noted that: Most of those targeted for deportation if not of the Windrush generation will have a link because they came to the UK to join parents or grandparents of the Windrush generation.”
The Canary question “Righting wrongs?” They say, “In Jamaica, the flight has also made the news. The Gleaner reported it understood that “upwards of 20 persons” could be on the flight. Windrush National Organisation (WNO UK) chairman Dr Desmond Jaddoo told the Gleaner: We are very concerned because we are aware that once landed, too many of these people have no family or friends returning to. It does beg the question whether or not the Home Office really committed to righting the wrongs, which it has committed, particularly to Jamaicans, because families are on tenterhooks and in fear for the safety of their loved ones.”
The Canary say, “Holbourne echoed a similar point. She told The Canary: Windrush Lessons Learned recommendations include the need for race equality training and the history of colonialism and Black people in Britain in order to avoid racist outcomes by the government. So it is disgraceful that despite the government setting up a commission on race and in the middle of them conducting a consultation on racism in Britain following the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer that they would think it acceptable to go ahead and do this now. The Home Office is claiming this flight will go ahead. It told the Morning Star: We make no apology for seeking to remove dangerous foreign criminals to keep the public safe. That is why we regularly operate charter flights to different countries to remove dangerous criminals who have no right to be here. But in February, a previous flight to Jamaica turned into a national scandal.”
As The Canary reported at the time, “the government made similar claims about the people it was deporting being criminals. But MPs and campaigners disputed this. One example is the case of Osime Brown. The Home Office had been trying to deport him. A petition to stop his deportation said: Brown is 22 years old, he is profoundly autistic and developmentally younger than his peers. Osime is also learning disabled, dyslexic and due to his time in care has since been diagnosed with PTSD, and suffers with depression. Osime was jailed in 2018 over the theft of a phone in a street robbery, despite a witness for the defence stating Osime had not taken the phone and had in fact asked the other teens carrying out the robbery to stop. He got 5 year’s in prison under the Joint Enterprise Law, it was also ordered that upon his release he be taken to a detention centre and be deported to Jamaica.”
The Canary report that, “As a result of this campaign and an appeal by his solicitor’s Osime was not taken to the detention centre upon his release due to his ill health, he is now home, yet still awaits deportation. People on February’s flight had also previously been convicted under the Joint Enterprise Law. It allowed judges to convict people of crimes such as murder. The rule was used in situations where someone was involved, but did not actually kill the victim. As the Guardian reported, in 2016, the Supreme Court said that judges had been ‘wrongly interpreting’ the law. This has led to people raising questions about a number of convictions using the rule. But what’s also of concern is something the Gleaner reported. It said that: It is believed that several of the people to be deported had a stay granted at the last minute from a charter flight earlier this year. Back in February, the Home Office was originally going to deport around 50 people to Jamaica. But after campaigns and legal interventions, the flight ended up having 17 people on it.”
The Canary reveal that, “BBC News said that court orders had stopped the Home Office deporting 25 others. So, it seems that this was just a brief period of respite for these people. Campaigners will be hopeful that the same outcry that was seen in February may halt the 2 December flight. But it’s of major concern that the government feels it can once again attempt to deport people who a court said couldn’t be deported earlier this year.” The Canary warn that, “given Boris Johnson’s support for home secretary Patel, despite the recent outcry over her alleged behaviour, it is unlikely the Home Office will back down. So it’s crucial as many people get involved to try and stop this deportation as possible.” The Canary ask people to get involved and offer a couple of possible interventions: Sign the Petition to stop the deportation flight; Also, Sign the Petition in support of Osime Brown.” The law that renders citizenship ‘conditional’ on good behaviour is fundamentally wrong.
In the UK it seems that there is one law for the masses, but quite another set of rules to protect the privileged. Even within the general population there are unacceptable variances based on race that we must work hard to eliminate. As we careen towards crash-out Brexit we get ever closer to the dangerous dystopian nightmare Tory Dictatorship that could take decades to overthrow. The Covert 2019 Rigged Election gifted this Tory Government a huge mandate to solidify their oppression over the people of the UK. It is still not too late to fight-back, demand justice and accountability; we could totally derail the Tory project by demanding a full Investigation of last December’s vote. We cannot allow the Tory corruption to continue unabated and that requires forming a viable robust opposition under a strong trustworthy Labour Leader: the Tory Trojan horse needs ousting ASAP. Patel must go, but I really doubt that Cummings has genuinely gone; we must keep intense pressure up on Johnson to “take out the trash!” DO NOT MOVE ON!