The Future? Do Me a Favour...

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One thing I simply don't understand and can't get my head around are the deportation programmes that seem to be de rigueur amongst the boneheads of the right, and by default these days, the left. Leaving aside the late Tory government's bonkers Rwandan scheme, we have Donald Trump's El Salvador lunacy, and according to the the latest information, even Denmark and Holland are jumping onto the bandwagon. But weirdest of all, are Farage's pronouncements on the issue, wanting not only to include illegal foreign-born 'miscreants', but UK born lifers and sundry other inmates to be deported to a raft of random destinations, too.

"Why? How? What for?" are the questions that immediately spring to mind, followed by "What sort of country actually wants to willingly import some other country's criminals in the first place?" Frankly it all beggars sodding belief and equates to a kind of human fly-tipping: quite ugly and pointless in the extreme, and which does no-one any favours at all. Like fly-tipping, the disposal of inconvenient humans is at best anti-social but is in essence essentially Fascist in character: simply dumping one's 'problems' outside someone else's front door and scarpering. We can and need to do better than this pathetic excuse for 'law & order'.

Farage's 'Britain is Lawless' slogan is neither helpful nor useful: as always, he's playing to the mob, and as a piece in this week's 'The New World' by Jonty Bloom points out, he's following the Trumpian playbook to the letter. Despite their apparent popularity in the polls, Reform have been afforded a disproportionate amount of media time - Farage always has commanded a disproportionate amount of attention for such a lightweight - and this needs to change, much as the prevailing narrative on Gaza needs to change.

The UK government needs to take off its blinkers to the real threats we face at home [Farage & Reform to name but one], let alone to those humanitarian catastrophes outside our shores that we could usefully and morally impact upon; and they need to act now, before their natural support base changes sides and even more of their backbenchers either desert them or simply get marginalised by the party itself through sackings. It's crunch time and Starmer needs to grow a very large pair in very short order, or Christ only knows where this country will be in five years time. He's got the majority, and he's got the time. He just needs the will and the courage to act on it and stop listening to the lobbyists clamouring for his attention...

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