It's not only on Rwanda that Tories want to ignore international law

SPURNED extremist Suella Braverman is continuing her leadership campaign with a fresh attack on her former boss Rishi Sunak. With the UK Supreme Court having ruled that Rwanda is not a safe country to which to send refugees and asylum seekers, today she has torn into Sunak's reality-defying plan to simply legislate that Rwanda is a safe country after all.

If this is successful then next week he can legislate that there are no small boats crossing the English Channel, inflation is at zero percent, there are no NHS waiting lists – and he's a universally beloved Prime Minister who has just won Strictly.

The Conservatives are obsessed with "stopping the boats" even though per head of population the UK takes in far fewer refugees and asylum seekers than many other European countries. It's a thinly veiled weapon in their culture war strategy, seeking to appeal to racists while providing plausible denial of a racist motivation.

There are boats that the Tories ought to be stopping, but they don't get worked up about the luxury yacht used by Michelle Mone (below). They'd rather we didn't talk about that particular boat at all, a reluctance shared by the BBC.

You might think Braverman would have approved of Sunak's plan to sidestep the Supreme Court ruling, seeing as how the denial of reality is very much her own stock in trade too. But no, the former Home Secretary has objected to Sunak's insanity on the grounds that it's not insane enough. Braverman firmly believes that it's always possible to ratchet up the egregious cruelty several notches further.

Not only is she demanding that Parliament must legislate to assert that Rwanda is a safe country no matter what the courts or reality might say, she is also demanding that the UK "disapplies" international human rights law to the Rwanda policy. Indeed, she goes further, questioning the very value of the "vague, unaccountable concept of international law”.

It's quite simple Suella, the value of international law is to protect us all from frothing authoritarian extremists like you.

Former Conservative minister Damian Green accused Braverman of being dictatorial and wanting to act like Vladimir Putin by placing the government above the rule of law.

Any normal person with a functioning conscience would understand that if a course of action runs counter to widely accepted international standards of human rights, then their proposed course of action is wrong, immoral, and cruel. Not Braverman. As far as she's concerned it's the international standards of human rights that are wrong.

Robbing the poor to pay the rich

Meanwhile the Conservatives have announced that benefit claimants who "refuse" work will "lose their handouts" in what's being dubbed the biggest crackdown on benefits claimants in a decade.

The choice of words tells you everything you need to know. Yet again, the Tories are vilifying the poorest and disabled. The low level of social security support for people in poverty was condemned a few weeks ago by Oliver de Schutter, the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. He cited research showing that universal credit payments of £85 a week for single adults over 25 were "grossly insufficient" and claimed the British government is violating international law.

Yet now we are supposed to believe that social security claimants suffering extreme poverty are living it up and need to be forced into even more extreme poverty in order to force them into work.

At the same time, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt (above) is considering introducing big cuts to the tax people pay after inheriting wealth, paid for in part by raising benefits by less than expected and less than is necessary to keep up with the rising cost of living.

Although it was announced this week that the headline rate of inflation was now less than 5%, food inflation remains stubbornly high. The Office of National statistics reported the rate of food and non-alcoholic drink inflation to be 10.1% for the month of October. But the Tories are not going to spend extra in order to assist people who are already destitute or in extreme poverty. Instead, they are going to use the money to allow people inheriting more than £325,000 to keep more of the money. This is literally robbing the poor to pay the rich.

Labour’s troubles rumble on

A former Labour MP has branded Labour's Scottish branch manager Anas Sarwar "grovelling and pathetic" after he made excuses for Labour's two Scottish MPs voting against a ceasefire in Gaza in Westminster – even as Labour MSPs will be told to back one in Holyrood.

Les Huckfield, who was a Labour MP for 16 years and an MEP for five, said Labour's Scottish branch office had been exposed as "the great pretenders" after its campaign during the Rutherglen by-election promising voters a "fresh start”.

He denounced Sarwar's speech as the most "pathetic" he'd heard in 60 years, adding: "Scottish Labour has to ask permission to vote for a ceasefire. When that permission gets refused, its leader offers the most supine, grovelling and pathetic explanation I've heard during 60 years of politics."

Light at the end of the long, dark tunnel?

With the dystopian mess that the UK is in, the Scottish Government has published a reminder that it doesn't have to be this way.

The new independence paper highlights the benefits of EU membership and outlines what Scotland could contribute to the bloc as an independent member state.

Constitution Secretary Angus Robertson said: “In the 2016 referendum on EU membership, the people of Scotland voted by a margin of 24 percentage points to reject Brexit.

“Despite that clear democratic expression by the people of Scotland we have been removed from the EU against our will and Scotland is now suffering the disastrous outcome of the hard Brexit negotiated and hailed as a fantastic deal by the Westminster government."

This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.

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