Government by outrage

Hunger camps and shanty towns

Dignity and love still holding

This blue-green ball in black space

Filled with beauty even now

Battered and abused and lovely…

Each one in his own heart

Desperate to know where we stand

Planet of the clowns in wet shoes.

These lines by Bruce Cockburn from his 1983 album, The Trouble with Normal, bounced around my head yesterday, drifting in and out like a dodgy radio signal. It got more insistent as the government’s response to its crushing defeat by the Supreme Court over its Rwanda scheme for asylum seekers became ever more deranged.

This is not so much government by outrage as government by hubris, rule by people so convinced of their own version of reality, that nothing will prevent them enacting it.

My work with refugees tells me the Rwanda policy is doomed. It is not deterring small boat crossings, it is not making the UK less attractive to those with family ties here, it is not clearing the burgeoning backlog of asylum claims, it is not reducing the eye-watering sums spent on hotels. It is an utter irrelevance. Worse than that, it is a vindictive washing of ministerial hands, a passing off of a problem no home secretary from May to Braverman has had the wit to fix.

There’s a scene in Ron Howard’s film Apollo 13 where Ed Harris as the grizzled mission controller in Houston, gathers his shell-shocked team and says, ‘let’s work the problem; let’s not make things worse by guessing.’ Hubris is when the people in charge cannot be bothered to work the problem but content themselves with stamping their feet and railing, Cnut like, at the in-coming tide.

A sensible government would have received the Court’s ruling and gone away to think about it. A sensible government would have thanked the court and gathered its advisers for a long hard look at the implications of the ruling for their policy on asylum in the context of their obligations to international treaties and national law, both of which were breached by the Rwanda policy, according to the court. A sensible government… Oh, what a glorious thought!

This is not a sensible government. This is a hubristic cabal of disaffected, entitled chancers. One of their number recommended ignoring the court and starting the flights immediately, others urged the immediate renunciation of our international obligations. The PM called a press conference, left his newly appointed Home Secretary to defend a policy in the House that he has previously described as batshit (though he didn’t recall the word!)

The government would legislate said the embattled PM. The government would raise the status of the agreement with Rwanda from an MOU to a treaty. The government would get planes in the air by the spring. Emergency legislation would declare Rwanda safe, the court having said it was not; the legislation would over-rule international objections, despite the court saying that UK law prevented the policy going ahead.

The press conference was an object lesson in refusing to face reality. He might as well have said that he was legislating that the earth was flat and the moon made of blue cheese. This would be ridiculous if it wasn’t so serious.

The trouble is that this vainglorious project is now a massive drag on parliamentary time. There are real issues to sort between now and the next election that will now be put on the back burner – a proper funding package to get the NHS through the winter, cleaning up our rivers, a transport policy to replace the cancellation of HS2, a proper house building strategy and reform of the dire situation facing so many renters. All these and more, many in the recent King’s Speech, will be delayed or ditched because a vindictive vanity project takes pride of place.

Some argue that an election will solve this; a government of grown-ups will replace the kindergarten crew. But this assumes the infection in the body politic will succumb to a quick course of antibiotics. I wonder if more radical surgery is needed. While the half-wits have been in charge, the public realm, the space we all rely on for our quality of life, has been seriously eroded, under-funded, denigrated, dismantled, discarded. How easily can that be restored? And behind that, how will a new administration regain the trust of the electorate as a whole necessary to lead the renewal of our common life?

The Rwanda plan is not really about asylum policy, it is about the way government treats people, all people. Looking across the public realm we see this in restrictions on industrial action and peaceful protest, the redrafting of ‘extremist’ to include those who question British values and history (as they define them), the shattering of the social safety net and the meteoric rise in destitution, the power to arbitrarily strip a citizen of their citizenship.

As Francis Wheen reminded us (in a quote often wrongly attributed to Tony Benn),

We should always watch how governments treat refugees, Neal Ascherson once wrote, because that’s how they would treat the rest of us f they thought they could get away with it.

Is this true of all governments? Maybe only our vigilance will ensure it isn’t.