From incompetence to malevolence

In the space of twenty-four hours we learn three things at once. An apparent Iranian plot against RAF Fairford has been thwarted. A former Hamas bodyguard, granted asylum and then a British passport, later used that status to help plot attacks on European Jews. And an Afghan small-boat arrival allegedly kidnapped and sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl in Belgium before smuggling her into Britain and living with her in Manchester.

On the same day Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announces she will reopen a refugee resettlement route that prioritises Afghan women and Palestinians - just as the government also announces its intention to seize empty properties. No co-incidence, one assumes.

The contrast is not subtle. British authorities will still arrest you for posting a “Fuck Hamas” meme. They will jail people for disabling inflatable boats. Meanwhile they naturalise a man, under a veil of secrecy, whose Hamas connections were a matter of public record - and continue to process thousands of Asylum claims from the same region.

It would be useful if someone in government could explain the operational logic of arresting five men with vans and suspected explosives two miles from Fairford while converting another former RAF station, Linton-on-Ouse, into housing for large numbers of young male asylum seekers. One base is treated as a high-value target that must be defended; the other is treated as spare capacity.

At this point this looks more like malevolence than incompetence - and I'm running out of lawful things to say about our current predicament. It is difficult to find civilised language because the language of normal politics no longer describes what we are watching. The question now is whether the British public will keep treating this as a policy disagreement or as something closer to a breach of the basic bargain between government and governed.

It’s my feeling that this is the point where the public has to go one further than protest because the regime believes it can do as it pleases. We are ruled by feckless braindead scum who seem to be going all out to make an enemy of the British people.

A government that still possessed a normal sense of self-preservation would treat the Fairford arrests as a warning about hostile states and their proxies, the Hamas case as a warning about asylum and naturalisation, and the Manchester case as a warning about what the small-boat pipeline actually carries. Instead the Home Secretary’s announcement lands as if none of those stories had happened.

The message is that the pipeline will be regularised, not closed; that “vulnerable” cohorts will be prioritised by category rather than by individual risk; and that former airfields and hotels will absorb the overflow while the public is told to be patient and generous.

That is why the language of ordinary politics feels useless. Ordinary politics assumes a shared premise: that the first duty of the state is the security of the people already here. When that premise is treated as optional, or as something to be balanced against a moral performance for international NGOs and domestic activists, argument about “numbers” and “backlogs” becomes a sideshow.

The live question is whether the country is still being governed as a nation with a right to refuse risk, or as a holding area whose objections are a public-order and political comms problem. Right now, the public is entitled to conclude that the regime has gone feral, and that the normal democratic process is dead - especially when the political focus will centre of the “far right”, as though this were happening in a vacuum.

The PM has today described migrant protests led by Danny Tommo as "the worst kind of hateful behaviour" which is yet another indication that Pollyanna Burnham is away with the fairies. Those of you who pay attention to far right demonstrations on the continent will know that the Patriotic Platform outings in recent weeks are remarkably tame by contrast. Danny Tommo is nowhere close to a “far right thug”, but on present trajectory, they will come out of the woodwork eventually, and probably not before time.

Labour will spend the next week talking about “hate”, “the far right” and “community cohesion” because those phrases are their political currency. The rest of us, meanwhile, are watching with dismay as the country disintegrates, and in horror as the only thing protecting us for further invasion is the British weather. The only remaining question is how long the public pretends that answer is still voting.

A country can survive bad policy - and even bad government. But it cannot survive a governing class that has changed sides without admitting it. When the state starts to regard its own people as the problem to be contained, and the outside world as the constituency to be served, the nation has not been reformed. It has been quietly reclassified as territory. That is the wider fact underneath today’s squalid details, and it will outlast the news cycle even if Labour spends the week congratulating itself for spotting “hate” in all the wrong places.