We may just have hit rock bottom in Broken Britain with the news that short-trousered slime ball Rishi Sunak has taken a £1000 bet with the former journalist Piers Moron that deportations to Rwanda will begin before the next general election. Just try to get your head round that, because I am not sure I can. Only a complete moron doesn’t realise that the Rwanda scheme is just a gimmick and even if it is successful in deporting a few asylum seekers – and that’s that’s all the scheme is intended to do – there are still 165,000 people waiting to have their cases assessed. I don’t want to get into yet another debate about migration in general and asylum seekers in particular so I am focusing on one thing with Sunak. How out of touch with reality can one person be?
Like it or not, asylum seekers and refugees are some of the most desperate people in the world. Sure a few wrong ‘uns get through the system, which says more about useless politicians like Priti Patel and Sue-Ellen Braverman than it does anything else, but most are just trying to get somewhere safe to live. The vast majority will have left everything behind to escape tyranny and what does the prime minister do? He thinks it’s a good idea to have a bet, a fucking bet, on their lives and their futures. Unbelievable.
To a bloke like Sunak, who with his wife is worth the best part of three quarters of a billion quid, £1000 is something he would probably find down the back of the sofa. It’s peanuts. When he accepted the bet with Moron, he won’t have thought, “Shit, can I afford that much?” Most of us couldn’t. To most of us, £1000 is a fortune. Christ, I think £100 is a lot of money, but then I didn’t have a privileged upbringing with the best education money can buy and never having to want for anything.
Let me put it another way, which is to say a way in which someone on X has just put it: “If his henchmen manage to drag vulnerable, defenceless, scared families onto a plane to Rwanda he stands to win a £1000 bet.” The absolute fucking state of it.
We are in a country where millions are using food banks, millions more can’t afford their heating bills, the NHS is chronically underfunded and people are waiting years for treatment, if they don’t die first, and the senior politician in the land has wagered a grand with a grubby and discredited TV presenter.
“I want to get the people on the planes”, sneers Sunak, even though the deal is for only 200 desperate people to be sent to Rwanda, before not adding, “And if I do, I’ll trouser a grand from Piers Moron. GET IN!” One very rich bloke having a bet with the richest politician in British history. It is hard to imagine something more crass. But this is what happens when the country is run – and pretty well owned – by people who have no idea how the rest of us live and frankly don’t care, either.
There’s something else about Sunak’s bet, though. He now has a vested interest, a personal financial interest in the outcome of a policy. This screams, does it not, conflict of interest?
Sunak’s defenders say, it’s not so bad. The winner of the bet will give the money to charity. Well, that means it’s still a bet, then. It’s a choice what Sunak and Moron do with their winnings but it doesn’t change a thing. Why don’t those two little toads, who have money to spunk on pretty well anything they like, don’t just donate a grand each to a decent charity? How about one to support refugees?
These, I fear, represent the modern values of the Conservative and Unionist Party. No wonder Aneurin Bevan said what he did. And he is as right today as he was when he made his comment in the first place. Lower than vermin. A lot lower, in my view.
