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12 hours ago
5
“Oi, you there! Yes, you the foreign-looking one. Get a move on. And you can leave that puffer jacket behind. That wasn’t a present. You were only lent it because you said you were cold.
“Hurry up, now. Up the stairs with you. And no more of that ‘chicken nugget bollocks’. You can eat something else where you’re going. Try the lamb kebab.
“And you, you can stop loitering at the back. What? Oh, sorry. I didn’t realise you were a security guard. You all look the same with your pixellated faces. Come along. We haven’t got all day.
“What’s that? You want a window seat? You’ll take what you’re given. Just count yourself fortunate we’re not sending you Ryanair. Then you really might have a hostile environment to complain about.”
Monday was borders and security day. The day when Labour were out to prove they could be every bit as beastly to immigrants as Nigel Farage. No need to get competitive with the Tories, as all they had ever managed to do was send four volunteers to Rwanda. But Reform UK was more of a problem. Now the party had more than 200,000 members. Some of whom had voted Labour at the last election.
The competition was on. To see who could channel their inner sadism best. There were no votes to be had in compassion. Affording people dignity. That was so last year. Now the fashion was to celebrate human misery. To turn deportation into a spectator sport.
See that sucker on the plane? He just spent a fortune getting to the UK and now he’s being sent back. Where to, you ask? Oh, anywhere. Africa, Asia, Europe. Antarctica if necessary. Anywhere will do. Just as long as everyone knows we’re being tough. Manhandle them a bit. Do it when it’s dark. That always makes things look much worse.
“We’ve got to be more Reform than Reform,” Yvette Cooper told her team. “We’ve got a good news story here. We’re already deporting 25% more undesirables than the Tories ever did. But no one believes us.
“We’ve got to turn it into a reality show. Let the public vote for their top 100 foreigners they would like to see kicked out of the country. So how about a trailer? We shoot a film noir of people having the worst day of their life and make it into a suspense thriller. To be continued…”
So late on Monday afternoon, the Home Office released its own soon-not-to-be Oscar nominated short. Two minutes and 46 seconds of torture porn. And somehow they managed to screw it up. By making you wonder what the point of it had been.
The film opened with a shot filmed from the top of some steps up to a plane. After a few seconds some blanked-out faces appear. Most of whom are wearing hi-vis jackets. It seems to take four members of Border Force to deport one foreigner.
Then we cut to a bus waiting at the bottom of the steps. Another foreigner followed by four men in hi-vis jackets gets out. Then the same thing happens again. And again. By the end of the film there are five foreigners onboard the plane. We end with a short clip of a plane taking off. We have no idea if it was the same one we saw earlier.
And that was it. We were left with no idea of who was being deported or why. They could all just have been extras from Silent Witness. All that was missing was Emilia Fox giving her concentration face in the pathology lab. It was little more than performative cruelty. And for no good reason. Because something like this was never going to appeal to Reform voters anyway. This wasn’t a mass deportation. Just a select handful. So disappointing. Barely an aperitif for the average sadist.
Nige would have done this so much better. Would not have bothered pixellating the faces. Would have let us see the suffering. It’s not enough for us to keep our borders secure. Others have to be made miserable in the process. And most of all the video failed on its own terms.
Reform voters won’t have watched and thought: “Ah! Labour are serious about immigration. We no longer have to vote Reform.” They will have just realised they had been right to switch to Reform all along. Why vote Labour when you can have the real thing?
While Yvette was trying to act like Nige, Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner were out on a walkabout in Cornwall with the king. As good a way to waste time as any. I mean, it wasn’t as if any of them were actually achieving anything much by wandering around a new build, sustainable development. No wonder Charles devotes so much time in an existential meltdown. A helicopter flight just to say “marvellous” over and over again.
“I’m called Charles, too,” said one of the locals. What were the chances?
As for Keir, he quickly lost interest. He just wanted to build 1.5m homes in the next four-and-a-half years. Charles had barely managed 800 in 10 years. Time to turn the tables. Could he go inside and check some of the houses? To make sure there were no immigrants hiding inside them. Foreigners were tricky bastards. You couldn’t trust them an inch. Some of them were bound to have found their way to Newquay. Even just one would do. Would make the day worthwhile. Yvette would be forever in his debt.
