PRIME minister Rishi Sunak saw the Tory plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda shredded by the Supreme Court ruling them unlawful on Wednesday.
Five judges at the highest court in the country ruled that the scheme was unlawful on the grounds that Rwanda was an unsafe country.
The judges noted the ‘poor’ human rights record of Rwanda and its record of deporting claimants back to their country of origin, countries they had fled in the first place to avoid torture and death.
The ruling concluded there are: ‘Substantial grounds for believing that the removal of claimants to Rwanda would expose them to a real risk of ill-treatment.’
The legal shredding of the Tory dream of dumping all asylum seekers in a Rwanda hell-hole with no chance of return, caused the predictable riots amongst Tory MPs with Tory Party deputy chairman Lee Anderson demanding Sunak should simply ‘ignore the laws’ and ‘just put the planes in the air now and send them to Rwanda’.
Sunak didn’t go that far. Instead, he promised simply to bring in new emergency laws ‘in the coming weeks’ to declare Rwanda – against all evidence – was in fact a safe haven for asylum seekers.
In fact, this is the Tory answer to all opposition to its rule, to bring in laws making everything that goes against the rule of the Tory party and the interests of British capitalism illegal.
So far, they have introduced laws to make strikes illegal and take away the legal right of workers to claim unfair dismissal for refusing to cross picket lines, along with laws that remove the legal right of immunity for trade unions from being fined by the bosses for loss of profits resulting from industrial action.
If the Tory party are tearing lumps out of Sunak for being ‘weak, ineffective’ and according to Suella Braverman a serial liar who broke all his promises to her to deport all asylum seekers and refugees then they had one reliable supporter in Labour leader Keir Starmer.
On Wednesday night, the Commons debated last week’s King’s Speech.
The Scottish National Party (SNP) submitted an amendment to the government motion on its plans for the year ahead, which called for an end to the ‘collective punishment of the Palestinian people’ and urged ‘all parties to agree to a ceasefire.’
Starmer has spent days rushing around Labour MPs, threatening shadow ministers with the sack if they voted for even this basic call for a ceasefire.
Instead, Labour submitted its own amendment supporting Israel’s ‘right to self-defence’ adding the useless call for ‘longer humanitarian pauses’ in the genocidal war being waged by the Zionist regime against Palestinian men, women and children in Gaza.
Such pauses would last for just a short time, sometimes just a few hours, while the Israeli troops and aircraft prepare for further slaughter and war crimes against babies and patients, as in Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital.
Starmer stood full square in a coalition with the Tories and US imperialism in his support for Israel, making him and those Labour MPs who voted with him complicit in the war crimes being committed by the Zionist regime. In the event, 56 Labour MPs defied the three-line whip Starmer imposed on the vote and voted for the SNP amendment.
This included 8 members of Starmer’s front bench team, who were immediately sacked or who had resigned earlier in anticipation of retribution.
This represented the biggest revolt of Labour MPs since Starmer instituted his campaign to expel or intimidate into silence all those in the party who resisted his drive to make Labour the acceptable willing partner to capitalism, with unswerving support for all the imperialist wars being waged, in an attempt to impose its domination over the world.
With millions of workers and youth demonstrating across the country their hatred and revulsion for massacres being committed daily in Gaza, the time has come to force the TUC to take decisive action.
At its special Congress on 9th December, the TUC must be instructed to immediately organise a general strike to kick out the Tories and put an end to Starmer’s reactionary coalition plans by going forward to a workers government and socialism.
This is the way forward!
