Priti Patel’s speech on the UK’s ‘broken’ asylum system is one of the ugliest & most sinister any British politician has made in many years. It really does spell out the direction of travel, in appealing to the Faragist/fascist underbelly inside and outside the Tory Party.

On the one hand it’s standard Tory claptrap: Our ‘proud’ tradition and our generosity t/wards refugees etc,but compassion must mean fairness and blah blah blah. But not a sliver of compassion to be found in this vicious little speech - not to mention the policies being mooted...

Wave machines. Detention camps in Moldova, Ascension Island etc - fitting punishments for the ‘invaders’ who tabloids, successive governments, Mosley-Farage, and soc. media racists have taught the UK public to fear and hate for years.

Patel has the gall to suggest that delays in processing claims of asylum seekers already here are due to migrants crossing the Channel who ‘shop around’ for asylum - a whopping stonier of a lie. So far still fairly standard but then

She accuses ‘lefty lawyers’ and ‘do gooders’ of blocking/appealing deportations and removals when they are in fact lawyers trying to uphold the law. She suggests they ‘profit’ from these activities in the same way as criminal smuggling gangs do.

She identifies smuggling gangs, lawyers and do gooders as common enemies of ‘the British people’. She attacks the lawyers for their ‘grand theories of human rights’ - that’s the entire body of international refugee law and the UK’s obligations under it.

She pretends to care about ‘real’ refugees (clue: only those the UK government let’s in from a distance, not the ones who come here ‘illegally’. In Patelland, if they crossed the Channel, they must be fake.

So this is a speech which pretends to uphold fairness and compassion toward refugees, but which is actually an invitation to hate them and hold them in contempt, and an invitation to the ‘British people’ to collude in the cruelty to come.

All this topped off with references to Churchill, and condemnations of statue protesters, BLM and other enemies of the ‘British people.’

In short, this is where Patel and her government intend to take us when Brexit is ‘done’- towards a future of endless culture wars

and a disgraceful race to the lowest moral denominator. That’s what we saw yesterday, and we can expect a lot more of it in the future, and that is why anyone who wants a country that acts on its best traditions rather than its worst, needs to call out this vileness now.