Remember when the Conservatives thought they were the party of law and order? Hilarious.
I’m not thinking here of the numerous illegal cringe-parties the government and its associates held during the Covid-lockdown. Although do watch the docu-drama “Partygate” if you want to increase your level of annoyance at their doings even beyond whatever it currently is. But here I’m thinking about rather more structural stuff.
Like how our former Home Secretary tried to coerce the police to ban certain peaceful protests on the topic of Palestine. The police said no, mainly on the basis that there is no law that would let them do so despite her suggestion that waving a national flag might be illegal - obviously Union Jacks would be exempt. She wasn’t at all embarrassed, but rather wrote a rant basically about how the police are too woke in a national newspaper which, thankfully, eventually, at least in part, got her fired.
It comes to quite something when we have to rely on the shattered remnants of the British police of all organisations - a large contingent of which have recently been officially determined to be “institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic” and seemingly pretty terrible at actually solving crime - to be the last desperate hope against an illegal trampling of our civil liberties, to be the “woke” ones. But credit where credit’s due, I applaud their actions in preventing a crime taking place in this case.
Now the courts ruled that the obviously illegal plan to ship off applicants for asylum to other countries was indeed illegal. Despite the fact that it seems very plausible that his latest Home Secretary described the plan as “batshit” in the past, Sunak once again isn’t embarrassed. Instead he’s trying to find some way to get through dubious new legislation that “allows” him to ignore the court’s decision, or pander to the worst of his party’s instincts to exit the ECHR, as well as presumably any other legislation that has a chance of protecting the outgroup, of binding the ingroup.
What some of his party say is up there in terms of incitement to the famously irresponsible “Enemies of the People” Daily Mail front page a while back. The police believe that Braverman’s comments on the protests were an important driving factor in the violent attacks that far-right protesters - note that this was a group that she wasn’t trying to ban - went on to perpetuate against them.
Further back of course there was all the Brexit stuff. Boris Johnson tried to pro-rogue Parliament to avoid mere democracy getting in the way of whatever his favourite idea of the time was at the time. This was deemed to have been illegal.
More recently, when the quagmire of the Brexit they’d “negotiated” continued to become ever more apparent, some of the Conservative party - including their leader - decided that they’d unilaterally invent some nice new legislation so that they could ignore the deal they’d already signed up to regarding trade with Northern Ireland. Even their own ex-leader, Theresa May, said the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill was illegal under international law.
There was a time when they also claimed to be the good at the economy. Haha.