Priti Desperate

The Johnson administration is now sliding into incoherent chaos and madness as the local elections fast approach. The Tories like winning, after all that is all they are interested in, the denial of power to others.

The Libertarian Party has already had to make a series of complaints to both the Electoral Commission and the Dudley Returning Officer about the Tory Party's blatant breaches of ‘purdah’ rules. No reply has been acknowledged or received.

The madness is exemplified by the insane proposals emitting from the desk of Priti "PR" Patel.

It is a rare event that this party has common ground with Justin Welby or the Civil Service, but this headline grabbing ‘let’s deport illegal immigrants to Rwanda’ is just another of Patel's self publicising stunts that nobody takes seriously and has a dubious grasp of international Law.

Patel is focused on election winning, which Tory Party Central Office is in a complete blue funk about. Sending Jews to a homeland in Uganda as opposed to Palestine was once a serious proposal that was rejected by Government and Jews alike. Patel should have known this, her grandparents emigrated from India to Uganda, her parents leaving Uganda when Idi Amin was in power.

Home secretary Priti Patel has conceded in an interview on LBC radio that her parents might not have been admitted to the UK under the immigration rules she is proposing. Interviewer Nick Ferrari – who traces his own background to an immigrant in the catering industry – pointed it out.

She replied: “Yeah, but also let’s not forget we are not changing our approach to refugees and asylum seekers, which is very different to a points-based system for employment and that particular route.”

Ms Patel later suggested that her family may have been dealt with under arrangements for those fleeing mistreatment abroad, rather than those for migrant workers, as they had faced persecution. Her parents came to the UK from the east African state in the 1960s and set up a chain of newsagents. However, their arrival came before dictator Idi Amin’s mass expulsion of Uganda Asians in 1972, which saw many families forced to flee the country and admitted to the UK under their status as colonial citizens.

Her choice of Rwanda is equally bizarre, given the Rwandan Genocide, also known as the genocide against the Tutsi, occurred between 7 April and 15 July 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War. During this period of around 100 days, members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu and Twa, were killed by armed militias. The most widely accepted scholarly estimates are around 500,000 to 662,000 Tutsi deaths.

The only way to stop the flow of illegal immigration is to remove the pull factor of benefits on tap, after stopping wars that create poverty and the need to flee. Iraq once had a GDP the same as Portugal, nobody wanted to leave an Iraq where there were jobs and a good education system. We then went and bombed it to bits.

Priti Patel has a seat in the cabinet in a Government Of All The Chancers instead of all the talents.

This proposal is a PR stunt. The Tories know they are in for a hammering at the local elections and are desperate for positive headlines. The Chancer in Chief, Boris Johnson (now facing at least a second fine) is clinging to power. Nobody expects him to resign over any shaming issue now.

This is a dying government that is doing nothing other than to stay in power.

Andrew Withers FRSA