This was first posted on Facebook on 14th February 2020, with support from my Ko-Fi network.
I know that right now, the fact of Sajid Javid’s resignation as Chancellor, his replacement as Chancellor by a junior minister who was elected MP in 2015 & before that worked for Goldman Sachs, and the fact that Budget Day for the UK is 11th March and it’s pretty evident that though Rishi Sunak will be presenting the Budget in the Commons, Dominic Cummings will be the Budget’s main author – all of this is more than a little overwhelming, and rightly so.
However, I’d ask you also to consider this:
The new Attorney General is Suella Braverman.
Suella Braverman’s parents emigrated to the UK from Kenya and Mauritius in the 1960s.
According to the current principles of Tory government with regard to British citizenship, Priti Patel – or whoever Dominic Cummings appoints to be Home Secretary – can have Suella Braverman and/or her parents, stripped of their British citizenship and expelled, stateless, from the UK, more or less on a whim. (If you think I might be exaggerating, look at what happened to Fatush Lala, British citizen left homeless & stateless in Brussels for three weeks because the Home Office said he’d made a mistake on a form he filled in 20 years earlier.)
No pressure, then?
Suella Braverman’s job appears to be to lead the government’s opposition to the right of the courts to restrict what the government can do. This is one of the goals Boris Johnson pledged in the GE2019 manifesto.
I’m taking the time tomorrow to write a more considered avaluation of the situation, or at least to sleep on it, but right now all I can think is about the prospects for government by king’s favourite.
Edinburgh Eye 