‘Stick with my plan’ says Rushi Sunak. ‘It’s working.’
Which I guess means Rishi Sunak’s grand plan is to lead the hapless Tory Party to the worst, most historic, and completely avoidable defeat, since 1997.
You go Tiger! You got this!
Everyone knows the Tories are about to get eviscerated in the forthcoming election.
Polling suggests that Labour could be looking at a 120 seat majority. Leaving the Tories with no more than 165 MPs. Which as anyone who lives on the UK’s South Coast knows, is little more than a dinghy full.
The Tories are pinning their hopes of a surprise victory on their Rwanda plan.
The knock kneed, unworkable scheme to solve Britain’s illegal immigrant crisis, by sending migrants to Rwanda (Come for the sunshine, stay for the genocide. Two Stars-Trip Advisor), one plane load at a time.
With 44,500 illegal immigrants arriving in the year ending June 2023. That’s a lot of plane loads. Nobody tell Greta.
The Tories see the Rwanda bill, currently boring its way through parliament, as their golden ticket to electoral success. Convinced that if, against the odds, they can somehow finangle just three Syrian men onto a flight to Rwanda, then the next election is in the bag.
They are deluded.
Thanks to ‘International Law’, the ECHR, activist human rights lawyers, a hostile civil service, limp ‘One Nation’ Tories, and a border patrol which is more farce than force, we’re not even capable of sending illegal migrants back to France, a perfectly nice, (if you like that sort of thing) safe country, twenty minutes after they’ve left it.
What hope have we got of despatching them instead to the African state of Rwanda?
It’s never going to happen.
And let’s be honest. We’re all sick of hearing about it.
The Tory plan to ‘Stop The Boats’ is a bit like a mum’s ‘diet’. She’s always on one, never stops going on about how well it’s going, how hard she’s trying, and how many ‘treats’ she’s skipped. But no matter how much time she spends assuring you about how ‘good’ she’s been, every time you look up from the TV to notice, you still have a fat mum.
Two years after the Rwanda plan was first conceived. Not a single plane, not a solitary migrant, not a one, has touched down in Rwanda.
Fans of the scheme should be careful what they wish for.
Each migrant sent to Rwanda could potentially cost the taxpayer £170,000.
£170,000! Just to fly to Africa! Isn’t there a Megabus?
Just think what the cash strapped, on its knees, collapsing under the relentless onslaught of pernicious Tory cuts, NHS could do with a hundred and seventy grand.
It could hire two full time Diversity Officers for that. And still have money left over, to pay for a part time Diversity Officer.
I saw the Rwanda accommodation on the BBC. No wonder it is so expensive. It’s genuinely lush.
Pleasant rooms, clean environment, good food, plenty of vitamin D. What’s not to like?
Apart from the slight chance of getting your arms lopped off by a machete happy Hutu of course.
Don’t show the Welsh. Or we’ll have the entire population of Port Talbot lining up at Gatwick. Pretending to be gay Iraqis, and demanding a ticket.
The government has already paid the Rwandans £240m.
At this point, not receiving plane loads of illegal migrants from Britain is one of Rwanda’s biggest industries. No, really.
To their eternal credit the Rwandan government has offered to pay the money back if (when) the scheme collapses, or if (when) Labour takes power and cancels it. So it looks like they are due a refund.
The Rwandans might also want to update their advertising in future. I’d suggest,
‘Illegal Migrants Wanted for Cash. No Time Wasters.’
Apart from literally no one, who is actually benefiting from this scheme? Don’t say the British public. Because we are currently spending millions of pounds and getting diddly squat in return.
The reality is, this stupid policy actually plays into the hands of left wing activists, human rights lawyers, the Labour Party, and the entire progressive elite. They clutch at their pearls, throw their hands up in disgust and pretend they detest the scheme. But in reality, they love it.
After all the Tory plan to send saintly migrants to Africa shows that the clever clogs class were right all along. It proves the Tories, overseeing by far the most left wing British government in living memory, are actually a mob of modern day Mosleys. Desperate to cleanse Britain of black faces. Ever dreaming of Empire, rivers of blood and an all white series of Bridgerton.
Thanks to the Rwanda scheme the illiberal elites get to paint their enemies as a cadre of white supremacists, racist gammons, lacking in compassion, and bereft of empathy. While at the same time (rightly) dismissing them as incompetent, blundering, and ineffective.
So of course, they can’t get enough of it.
I expect the only people more desperate than Sunak for this zombie Rwanda deal to stagger pointlessly on, is the ever tutting, neon haired, perma-angry editorial team at the Guardian.
If you ask the public what to do about the small boats the most popular answer, according to YouGov, is they want these illegal migrants to be removed from the country immediately, with no right to appeal.
But who cares what the public think? They only have to pay for the migrants’ free hotel rooms, free food, and free medical treatment.
Bigots.
Though the Rwanda scheme might not be the election winner that fever dreaming Tories imagine, immigration is still a big issue
Polling consistently puts it in the top three concerns of most voters. Along with cost of living, and the death rattling NHS. (Invaluable YouGov tracker here.)
We’re told that the general public’s growing antipathy towards immigration is fuelled by racism and ‘hate’.
Just like the imaginary ‘far-right’s’ irrational opposition to ULEZ cameras and Irish kids getting stabbed, our refusal to joyously embrace the unquestionable benefits of mass, uncontrolled immigration, foreshadows a tsunami of xenophobia and intolerance which threatens, at any moment, to swamp our rainbow hued, multicultural Nirvana.
The bovine masses, led astray by adverts on buses and a failure to listen to Emily Maitlis on The News Agents podcast, have succumbed to their inner Trump, and stand unsteady on the precipice, one nudge away from unleashing a race war on blameless minorities.
(I said ‘blameless’ minorities. So sorry jews. Not you. )
But public concern about mass, and what is euphemistically dubbed ‘irregular’, immigration, has little to do with skin colour. It has more to do with the impression, right or wrong, that when it comes to access to social housing, education, and the NHS, regular Brits, whatever their origin, are being squeezed out.
Progressives dismiss these genuine concerns as malevolent far right fantasies. Of course they do.
New immigrants, illegal or otherwise, are not usually housed in the posh part of town, they’re not filling up classrooms at schools populated by the kids of top civil servants, they’re not clogging up GP surgeries in Chipping Norton.
But, but, but, splutter the Guardian reading elites, high on sanctimony and focaccia, what you don’t understand is that immigration makes the country richer, immigration increases GDP.
So we all benefit.
Maybe. But most newcomers aren’t high skilled brain engineers. They are more often uneducated, unskilled, with a poor grasp of English. Suitable only for those menial jobs that regular Brits turn their nose up at. Or else they are the dependents of low earning, or no earning, students.
Let’s put the opinion to one side for a moment. And instead take a high brow, scientific look, at the economics.
Imagine you are sitting at table in Nando’s with nine of your friends. You are about to go to the counter and order. You’ve each got £10 in your pocket. Enough for a quarter chicken and chips, or spicy rice, each. Delish.
In total, your table is worth £100.
Everyone is having a great time, taking the mickey out of that one guy who always orders Lemon and Herb.
Then another friend turns up, strapped for cash, he’s only got £1.
You invite him to sit down anyway.
Technically the table has just got richer, because it is now worth £101.
But on average each of the original diners has got poorer by about 8%.
And not only are you each a bit poorer, you feel morally obliged to chip in and pay for the latecomer’s Nando’s.
You grumble about it a bit. But your mate is your mate, and he’s had a hard time recently, so you don’t mind really.
And then the maître d’, (Yes they have those in Nando’s now, didn’t you know? It’s gone upmarket) keeps inviting £1 diners to join your table. People you don’t even know.
And after a while you can no longer afford that quarter chicken and chips. Now the original ten diners can each only afford chips, or if you are lucky, mac ‘n’ cheese. So you order that instead.
‘How come he gets mac ‘n’ cheese!??’ Demands a £1 newcomer, after you’ve just paid for his chips. ‘He’s greedy!!’
The maître d’ promises to stop inviting them. But these skint newcomers just keep turning up, often getting squeezed into the best seats. After all they have to sit somewhere. Right?
And soon the table is overcrowded and no one can afford anything at all. So you go to complain to the maître d’, but he’s left now, and is over the road, eating a slap up meal with his posh friends in Ottolenghi.
Welcome to Britain.
The most interesting part of the latest polling is that the Tory Party looks set to lose every single one of the ‘Red Wall ‘ seats Boris Johnson won in 2019.
During that campaign he asked these traditional Labour supporters to ‘lend him’ their votes. They did.
Perfidious Johnson, promised, hand on his lying heart, that he would ‘level up’.
A vague term which voters were led to believe meant that the government would stop prioritising London, the entrenched elites of the university class, and newly arrived immigrants.
Instead it would favour the regions, British workers, and the needs of regular people.
How did that go? Well three prime minsters later we’ve got eight million people on NHS waiting lists. Higher taxes. Inflation which is steadily eroding the little of our own money the government generously allows us to keep. Net Zero energy policies which promise to outlaw driving a car, going on holiday and keeping our houses warm. Legal immigration running at 750,000 a year. A daily tax, which punishes London’s poorest drivers. Male rapists in female prisons. And more than five and half million people claiming out of work benefits.
And the icing on the cake, the promise of a visit from plod for having the temerity to complain about any of it.
The elites don’t just want to shut us up. They want to lock us up.
If the recent Post Office scandal has taught us anything, it’s that as far as our bosses are concerned, the little people don’t count.
No wonder the Red Wall wants its votes back.
The upcoming competition between Sunak and Starmer holds all the allure of watching two accountants fighting over a stapler.
Neither has much personal appeal.
Post Christmas, tiny Rishi Sunak reminds me of nothing so much as an elf which has escaped from its shelf. Like the elf, he likes to give the impression that he is benign, generous and fair. When he is, in fact, nothing but a little snitch, always invading our privacy, micromanaging our lives and regulating our every activity.
And people say Keir Starmer has an odd, ‘rabbit in the headlights’ demeanour. That’s a bit unfair. For what it’s worth I think Sir Keir has a rather pleasant face. At least I’m sure it will be, when it’s finished.
The Tories have been trying to frighten the voters out of voting Reform. Saying that doing so will only guarantee a Labour victory.
But after thirteen years of betrayal, lies and incompetence, the people want change. And the voters, and especially ex Tory voters, are past scaring.
Many have made the calculation, if five years of startle eyed sanctimony from Keir Starmer and his wonky band of pinch faced woke misfits is the price we have to pay to rid us of the venal, incompetent, lying Tories, then bring it on.
And if the annihilation of the Tories lays the groundwork for a political realignment, and the birth of a new British populist party, like those we have seen of late, sweeping up votes across Europe and Argentina, then even better.
It seems we are all accelerationalists now.
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LSO.
NB. AI art from Hotpot.ai
As ever you hit all the nails on the head. I’m a die hard small c conservative at the right wing end of the spectrum who’s voted for the Big C Conservative Party at every general election since first eligible in 1983. My views haven’t changed much fundamentally in the subsequent 40 years but I’m not voting for them any longer.
While I utterly despise Labour and fear the climate change obsessed wokefest we will have to endure it’s time to lend my vote, at least tactically initially, to Reform, just as I lent my vote at all Euro ejections from 1994 to UKIP. Whether the tactical vote eventually does any good is an open question but we can’t carry on with the present pretence of having a centre right party. I never expected the tactical vote for UKIP to get anywhere, so there’s hope even in unlikely circumstances.
Love your articles so much, LSO - they are packed with such acutely observed, hilarious one-liners - genius!