When I look back over the last eight years, one image dominates.

September 2019, and @paulasherriff 's pleas to Johnson to tone down his language - language being quoted back to her colleagues in death threats - is dismissed as 'humbug' . THREAD

It wasn't the day the ugliness started - heaven knows there'd been enough of that under Theresa May, who bears far more responsibility for it than some would have you believe.

If you have progressive instincts and don’t live in Scotland, I suspect it can be hard to understand the ambivalence or even hostility felt towards Labour by many people who might naturally vote for them were they living in England. THREAD Maybe, paradoxically, you need to look at the Tories to understand.

The party of Truss, Braverman and Anderson.

The party which lets rampant Islamophobes retain the whip.

The party which accepts money from people who would wipe out our freedoms in the blink of an eye.

Imagine being angry about small boats, wanting to see refugees shipped to Rwanda, and not knowing what Labour’s policy was.

Mightn't you read this tweet as a message that Labour, in power, would promise to send more people to Rwanda?



THREAD

https://twitter.com/UKLabour/status/1733183398091374769

Like much Labour material, it’s clever drafting – designed to send different messages to people with different politics.

A necessary evil, you might say, of the First Past the Post system.

(The one the Labour leadership doesn’t want to change)

But it’s dangerous.

Last year I wrote this on refugee policy:

"This is what happens when you normalise the unthinkable.

First it becomes thinkable.

Then sayable.

Then ‘desirable’, ‘the only option’, ‘common sense’.

Once out there, it cannot be unthought, unsaid, unnormalised".

THREAD I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the past year, as Rwanda has entered the national vocabulary.

We all know what Rwanda means these days.

It’s much more than just a country.

It’s a policy.

A way of thinking.

A statement of ill intent.

Here's a tale of two Cleverlys. THREAD

Have a look at this paragraph from a summary of the the UK-Lebanon development partnership, with its focus on helping both Syrian refugees and Lebanese host communities. Or this from the UK government's equivalent document for Jordan, which covers similar territory.

Here is a list of popular phrases used by the Party of Law and Order, each with its English translation for the uninitiated:

THREAD ‘We will not allow a foreign court’

Translation:

‘We will break the law’.

In another life, a man with a security fetish and CBeebies presenter vibe boasts on TikTok that he’ll treat Rishi Sunak with the utmost cruelty.

THREAD In another life, a woman with a jaunty manner and monstrous ego dog whistles to the mob that any lawyer who dares to defend Suella Braverman is fair game.

The other day I heard Sir John Hayes MP, close confidant of Suella Braverman, saying that the “culture wars” are an important aspect of politics because they are about values.

The implication being that they are a good thing.

THREAD I also heard him saying that – in any case – it was the “other side” who started those culture wars.

The implication being that they are a bad thing.

All a bit confusing.

Whether or not this is true, it’s like blaming your civil servants for losing a game of Russian roulette which they have only been playing at your instruction. THREAD

https://twitter.com/peston/status/1673640292350586880

It wasn’t civil servants who held their own compatriots to ransom no less than three times with the monstrous threat of a ‘no deal’ Brexit.

It was the May and Johnson governments which Hancock was happy to serve in.

When I was a civil servant, it was always drummed into ministers that - whatever they said about the arms trade - the answer should never be ‘if we didn’t sell arms to country A, somebody else would’. THREAD (about refugees). It’s a message that seems to have been lost today. But its rationale is obvious. It’s morally empty. Just replace it with ‘drugs’ and the argument falls apart. You need a better one.

If you want to measure the decline of our political culture, it’s worth reflecting that there are people penning columns tonight with variations on the theme of Johnson’s and Braverman’s martyrdom at the hands of the ‘woke blob’. Their headlines will be read out on TV. They will appear on the flagship political panel show of the UK’s national broadcaster. Some of them will be given their own programme on the laughably named ‘GB News’.

When you shut out all noise, the Conservative Party are having a lively debate about the future of the civil service because one of their ministers wasn’t allowed to get away with bullying civil servants. You can add this to the lively debate they had about the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards because one of their MPs wasn’t allowed to get away with corruption.

I learnt two things about the subject of child grooming gangs on Monday’s @TheNewsAgents.  Firstly, there's no evidence of over-representation of any ethnic group within these gangs. Secondly, some allegations have indeed been ignored because of “cultural sensitivities”. THREAD It's right to be horrified by the latter while recognising the vitally important wider context of the former. But that’s not what the Home Secretary did this week. She deliberately confused the picture.

The aim of so much of the ‘commentary’ which blights today’s UK is to persuade people there is no legitimate public conversation to be had about morality or compassion.

To persuade them that there is only "virtue signalling", "wokery" and "sanctimony". Once enough people accept that premise, you are in deep trouble.

Think about it.

There is nothing too offensive to be called out, nothing too disgusting to be condemned, nothing too dangerous for us to be alerted to.

Its implications are terrifying.

When interviewees refuse to answer hypothetical questions, as Tim Davie did yesterday, there’s a simple solution: reframe it as a question of principle. It’s essentially the same thing. So: ‘Is it wrong to kill, Mr Davie?’ ‘I’m not going to answer hypothetical questions’.

There was a moment recently when @lewis_goodall made me cry. "The kind of crushing thing", he said, "is what pulls them, like so many before them, to Britain. It’s the esteem they hold us in. They think Britain is different. They think Britain will treat them better". THREAD It's poignant to think that, even after yesterday, many asylum seekers will still think like that. Because yesterday was a dark day for Britain. Once again our leaders dehumanised refugees. Once again they used disgusting rhetoric. Once again they brought shame on this country.

I hate to say it, but the UK is becoming a country where showing compassion to those who ask for help is not seen as a moral responsibility. Not just by the government, but by the political and media culture which dances to its tune and which rubs off on far too many people. You still hear ministers mouthing the word ‘compassion’. But words which are matched with no action are worse than meaningless. They are propaganda tools.

For a few weeks in 2009, when I worked for DFID and it looked as if the H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic might be of a similar scale to what we've seen with Covid-19, I attended official-level cross-Whitehall coordination meetings. The meetings were huge, drawing on civil servants from across Whitehall, often multiple people from one department, all with different areas of expertise.

Message to any amateur psychologists out there who profess to cherish the Union. This cartoon doesn't say "we've decapitated our political foes". It says "we've kept Scotland in its place". (Clue: it's in the pipes and the tartan).

https://twitter.com/DaveBrownToons/status/1625926311993540637

Imagine that you're a lifelong Unionist living in Scotland, shaken by Brexit and the events of the last few years, when so many of the things you once believed the UK stood for seem to have crumbled away. When you wonder if, even back then, it was all an illusion.

Three issues I have with Labour that have absolutely nothing to do with who leads the SNP: 1) their absolute, unwavering commitment to the theft of my children’s freedom of movement;

I'm always struck by how many people who clearly consider themselves progressive/of the left will say things like "I oppose nationalism in all its forms", or its stronger cousin "all nationalism is regressive/evil" - usually when talking about Scotland. This is one of those mantras that is intended to sound wise, and profound, and moral, but that usually comes across as a platitude - and a fairly shallow one, like all platitudes.