I'm very sorry to hear Andrew Mitchell sell his soul on the radio right now. A formerly decent man with knowledge of his subject area who must know the nonsense he is spewing. He should hang his head in shame. He insists there are functioning safe passages for Afghans to the UK through ARAP. Wrong. In reality, countless thousands of Afghans have been let down and betrayed by Britain. But even if it was true, you could then easily accept the amendment.

Once again, the Lords fight back against Rwanda. I thought they'd resist a couple times then let it go. I was wrong. The Lords is consistently attacked by left and right. On weeks like this, you realise how utterly essential they are. The Commons is powerless against the government. The Lords are not.

The Commons rejected all Lords amendments on the Rwanda bill last night. This is actually relatively surprising. There was an expectation that the government would accept at least some of them. In particular, we thought they might accept an amendment protecting victims of modern slavery and another exempting armed forces personnel & their families from removal. We assumed that on the basis of basic decency. And were therefore predictably wrong.

Nothing is going to take place over the next 6 months. No meaningful legislation, no attention to public services. Each in-depth weekend newspaper article will essentially say the same thing, which is that the Tories are fucked and don't know what to do about it. MPs will go to parliament & ministers will make Commons statements, but it'll all be pointless. The machinery of govt has stopped. Power has drained from No10. Only activity left is people figuring out which post-election leadership candidate they want to hitch their wagon to.

Everything about this is fucking disgusting.

https://twitter.com/Independent/status/1754497606611316795

Those are people, god damn you. When we actually process the claims, the majority are granted asylum. That means they are fleeing torture, war and oppression. They're not something for two rich men to do a bet about, like it was a harmless fucking game.

TRAITORS. FUCK ME . It's pure drama. Just the just preposterous fucking full bore goddamn drama.

It's really good to see the interviews with postmasters and what they've been through. It would be nice if we could have seen just one interview with an asylum seeker this week while we talked about Rwanda. Just one. What would happen if we covered this story as we are now covering that one? The government says Rwanda is a deterrent. Perhaps they could tell us if that was likely to work. How other measures sold as deterrence impacted them.

I'm sorry to inform you that MPs have now started debating the Rwanda bill. If you are not interested in the bill MUTE THIS THREAD NOW. Because I am going to be reporting this thing throughout the day and night. God help me. Foreign secretary James Cleverly starts by telling the house that there has been a death on the Bibby Stockholm punishment accommodation barge. He doesn't say this reports from the BBC indicate it was a suicide.

So the Rwanda bill is here. A day of absolute chaos and indignity. Johnson trying to evade blame for hundreds of thousands of deaths at the covid inquiry. Braverman making a Powell-like speech in the Commons. Sunak trying to placate the 1922 committee. Now this. A party in a state of nervous implosion, falling apart while still in government.

We should call this what it is: an assault on mixed-nationality British families. The income requirement for a British citizen to bring their foreign partner to live with them is rising from £18,600 to £38,700

freemovement.org.uk/government-att… These despicable cold-hearted Kafka fucking monstrosities. It's not a family income threshold - it's for the British citizen and applies regardless of how much their partner earns.

He's just the most dreadful cloying insincere reactionary little dimwit.

https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1724834981988479053

It was a British court that ruled it unlawful. A. British. Court. It doesn't become a foreign court by saying it repeatedly.

Sunak on Rwanda: The court "confirmed the principle of removing asylum seekers to safe third country is lawful - there are further elements that they wanted additional certainty on." Hilarious. Says he's working on a new treaty with Rwanda and is prepared to "revisit our domestic legal framework" if necessary.

A staggering place to be. Left to the police to balance free speech & disorder, while PM & home sec engage in provocations. Then left to the police to face the violence triggered by the govt. And after all that, not a word of gratitude from No.10 or the Home Office. You sometimes think you'll lose the ability to be shocked. But to see the police - the*police* - left to stand up for basic liberal democratic values while the govt spins off into far-right agitation is really a sight to behold.

Sunak is cowardly enough to hold an election in the winter of 24/25, but I'm not convinced he's quite stupid enough. If you've lost the air war, you really need a strong ground war. Asking lots of mostly older volunteers to go out in the cold wet darkness seems... suboptimal. The most likely point of the next election is autumn.

BY-ELECTION ANALYSIS: There's really only one pertinent fact to take from all this, and it's that the Tories are finished

iandunt.substack.com/p/by-election-… There's a delicious sense of justice here. The Uxbridge win led Sunak to adopt a posture of increasingly aggressive climate sabotage - cancelling HS2, weakening carbon commitments, inventing imaginary wars on motorists and meat-eaters.

God help me, I'm not sure I can survive an hour of Sunak's hypocrisy. While we're waiting, here's a Thought for the Day from John Maynard Keynes:

"We do nothing because we have not the money. But it is precisely because we do not do anything that we have not the money."

Festering bullshit. Every single policy here is utterly deranged.

https://twitter.com/peterwalker99/status/1707871279645102474

A conscious attempt to undermine environmentally friendly transport and encourage environmentally damaging transport. It's the kind of thing a supervillain would do if they became mayor in a Spider-Man comic.

Would strongly recommend reading last month's NAO report into the condition of school buildings. It's evidence of full scale failure - in the department and the Treasury. nao.org.uk/reports/condit… Even if the department had all the money it needed, it would struggle to target it effectively, because it lacks quantitative evidence.

On Monday, the UK Health Security Agency warned about respiratory infections on the barge. They were ignored. news.sky.com/story/asylum-s… The UK’s Fire Brigades Union has described it as a "potential death trap". A government source dismissed it as propaganda from "Labour and its union backers". amp.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug…

We spoke a lot about the radicalisation of the Labour membership under Corbyn, but much less about the radicalisation of the Tory membership under Brexit.

https://twitter.com/redhistorian/status/1687009630331830272

After all, these are the people who put Liz Truss in charge of the country. In short: they're batshit.

In terms of policy this is all utterly obscene. No interest in the environment, or road safety, or quality of life - just a fake half-arsed sense of electoral game-playing. Sunak's next desperate failed attempt to divide people for his own gain. theguardian.com/politics/2023/… He's an absolute embarrassment of a prime minister: a technocrat pretending to be a populist. Failing to fix anything, failing to divide people, lacking any of the chummy charisma required for the role, a pitiable spectacle of a man.