Farrukh Dhondy | Just like Ravan, Suella stumbles and falls off her perch amid row
“O come with old Bachchoo and leave the lot
Of God-men and life-style gurus forgot
Let them preach to gullible fools
On their quest for ‘spirit’ -- heed them not!”
From Hey Bhagwan, What about Hindoostan? by Bachchoo
A bit of schadenfreude never hurt nobody. Or maybe it did -- but this week at the festive time of Diwali, and projecting back to Dussehra, which was only in October, so not so long ago… Gentle reader, I did not even at Dussehra construct a statue on Tutenkhaman (sorry, Tooting Common!) and set it alight as dark descended. I did put out festive lights on the doorstep at Diwali, but my philosophical delight was “Dussherric” and prompted by the stumble and fall of a political demon.
Yes, Cruella Cowardperson, sometimes known as Suella Braverman, has been toppled from her home office pedestal. PM Hedgie Sunoch finally decided that he no longer has to tolerate her hate speeches. He and his chamchas certainly took Tory Party soundings and discovered that his fear of Cruella being the leader of a right-wing Tory faction was now,
after her latest boo-boos, no longer a threat.
Even if these Cruella-gang MPs, known as the European Research Group (which is like calling animals in London Zoo “The Einsteinian Research Group”), agree with Nasty-ella’s statements, her attack in an article in The Times on the Metropolitan Police, of whom she is ultimately in charge, was a dog-whistle too far.
The story? On the Monday before last Saturday, Cruella wrote an article in The Times saying that London’s police force should shut down the pro-Palestinian demonstration scheduled for that following Saturday, which was Remembrance Day. Her article claimed that the police was soft on left-wing demonstrations and hard on right-wing ones. She labelled the pro-Palestinian demonstration a “hate march”.
Hedgie, who made his fortune by speculation in hedge funds, sat on the hedge (Have I got the expression wrong? --fd) on this one. Though it is a binding convention that the government speaks with one voice and not with a forked tongue -- and that all public statements of import should be approved by the PM’s office -- this article was not, and Hedgie knew it was not, but did nothing immediately about it.
He made pious statements about Remembrance Day being about memorials to those who had sacrificed their lives in the world wars, and… blah blah! He spoke to the Metropolitan Police commissioner who took the perfectly legal view that he couldn’t see sufficient cause to ban the pro-Palestine demo.
Then events took their course. The organisers of the Palestinian demo assured the Met police commissioner that they would not go anywhere near Whitehall where the Cenotaph to the fallen soldiers stands. They would meet in Hyde Park and march to the US embassy in Vauxhall.
The police said that 300,000 people turned up on the pro-Palestinian demonstration. The organisers contend that it was more like 800,000. The demo went off peacefully. There were no attacks on the police, though they did make eight or ten arrests, including of some deranged provocateur shouting “kill all Jews” and someone who shouted “Hitler was right”, or words to that effect. The other 700,992 called for an end to the killing of Palestinian civilians and demolition of their homes, schools, hospitals, etc etc.
But, gentle reader, as Cruella watched from her protected home and as Hedgie peered from atop the Hedge, a few hundred self-confessed British Nazis went to the Cenotaph to “protect it” and attacked and fought the police in Whitehall and then in nearby Pimlico, from where they were headed to Vauxhall to attack the pro-Palestine demonstration. Around a hundred of them were arrested and charged, not with hate speech, but with assaulting the police.
So, Cruella’s contention was right? The police were lenient with the peaceful pro-Palestine march which exercised its right to free speech, and they were hard on the right-wing patriots who were perhaps provoked into attacking the biased coppers as Cruella, home secretary, if you please, pointed to the police as the enemy of those she sympathised with.
Oh -- and one of the marchers at the pro-Palestine demo proclaimed that “Yes, it is a hate march -- We hate Suella”.
These events indicated to Hedgie that he should climb down from the hedge and summon the courage to sack Ravan -- I mean …um …Cruella. He did.
Another torch to Ravan was last Wednesday’s judgment by Britain’s Supreme Court that the scheme dreamed up by the three UK immigrants … I mean Priti Patel, Hedgie Sunoch and Cruella -- to send asylum seekers to Rwanda was illegal. These three have already spent millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on this scheme and it’ll now have to be scrapped. Hate-waste? Cruella has also attacked homeless people in Britain saying they make a “lifestyle choice” and sleep on the pavement, and in tents supplied by charities, because they like suffering thus.
Again, she calculates that this nasty rhetoric will win her Tory members’ votes and project her, when Hedgie like Humpty falls off the hedge, into being a possible leader of the party and hence a future Prime Minister.
This is a total misreading of the British perennial mood. Yes, there is xenophobia, yes there is racism, yes there is some backlash against purported “scroungers”, but Britain still has procedures through which Ravan can be home minister in, perhaps, Ayodhya. Until next Dussehra, that is!
