Another Angry Voice - 11 February 2020

Two years ago it was revealed that the Tory government had been illegally discriminating against black British citizens, using Theresa May's unlawfully racist "Hostile Environment" legislation to deny housing, employment, banking services, social security, and even life-saving medical care to thousands of black British citizens.

One of the worst aspects of all was the fact that Theresa May's "deport now, hear appeals later" principle resulted in scores of black British citizens being wrongly deported, several of whom died in exile overseas.

The outrage was such that deportation flights were cancelled, government ministers pretended to care for a while, and Theresa May had Amber Rudd take the fall for her by resigning.

The following year Hostile Environment was ruled unlawful in the Supreme Court, and then Britain and the mainstream media simply forgot about it.

During the 2019 General Election there was virtually no mention of the Windrush scandal in the mainstream media, as if the use of unlawfully racist legislation to deport black Brits to their deaths in exile overseas was some kind of trivial irrelevance, rather than evidence of how the Tories behave in government.

Another issue that the mainstream media barely covered was the contents of page 48 of the Tory manifesto, in which they pledged to dynamite the power of the courts to rule on government actions and declare government legislation unlawful.

Basically Britain and the British mainstream media didn't give a shit about Tory racism, or their overt contempt for the rule of law, and now the consequences of this apathy are becoming clear.

Now that the Tories have their majority back they've resumed deportation flights, but last night the court of appeals ruled that a deportation flight to Jamaica should be stopped because the deportees had been denied proper legal advice.

The newly emboldened Tories have decided to simply ignore the court ruling and carry out the deportations anyway.

Of course the right-wing authoritarian gobshites will try to defend the deportations by pointing out that the deportees were foreign-born convicted criminals found guilty of offences like class A drug offences and violent crime.

However the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was born in the United States, openly admits the use of class A drugs like cocaine, and was recorded orchestrating the violent assault of a journalist.

In Britain there's one set of rules for white upper class toffs, and a completely different set of much harsher rules for people like the working class kids of the Windrush generation who were brought to Britain as small children.

Of course the vile right-wing mob who insist racism doesn't even exist in Britain will deliberately overlook the fact that Johnson and his cabinet of far-right ghouls have resurrected the Windrush scandal within months of securing parliamentary supremacy, but they're clearly overlooking an even bigger picture than the fact that Britain is an indisputably racist country under Tory rule.

What they're failing to grasp is that if the Tories are prepared to ignore explicit court rulings like this, and they push on with their agenda of disempowering the courts, it won't just be black deportees who suffer.

If the Tories continue brazenly ignoring court rulings, scrap judicial reviews, and prevent the courts from ruling on the legality of government actions, then what's to stop them from closing our local A&E, allowing planning permission for a toxic waste incinerators near our kids' school, bringing in retroactive laws to criminalise behaviour that was perfectly legal when we did it, unlawfully attacking our workers' rights, scrapping our entitlement to social security that we've spent decades paying for through National Insurance contributions, or rigging future elections to keep themselves in power indefinitely?

When a lawless and brazenly racist government wins power, the first victims are always going to be people of colour and other minorities, but once they become accustomed to the unrestrained and lawless execution of power, what's to stop them once they come after the rest of us?

If they ignore legal judgements when it comes to deporting people from their homes and their families over the kind of non-violent drugs offences that they themselves have admitted, do you really think they'll suddenly revert to respecting the law of the land of their own volition at a later date?

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