I’m getting sick of the Tories

I suppose this happens to all of us at different speeds, but I am getting a little fed up of this government. In particular, I am getting fed up of the gap between its rhetoric and its actions. Most of the time this is most noticeable with the Prime Minister, who gives his base the occasional morsel of right-wingery only to then force-feed them great dollops of lefty-greenery. On a trip to Washington, Priti Patel has demonstrated that she is also no stranger to this tactic.

So far we have had Patel (the DC version) talk about ‘the mass migration crisis’, as though she is merely an observer of the crisis in the Channel rather than one of the only people actually able to solve it. Then we have the Guardian claiming that Patel is planning to introduce a clause to the nationality and borders bill allowing the government to remove people´s citizenship retrospectively. I hope that this is the case, but since it is the Guardian that it is reporting this, it may very well not be true, and be just another ruse to aggravate a few Guardianistas and excite a few Tories.

And now we have Patel announcing in DC that the UK government is going to proscribe the terrorist group Hamas in its entirety. This is a step forward, to be sure. It has always baffled me why the British government continues the pretence that terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are divided into ‘military’ and political wings. The groups themselves don´t recognise this division of labour. They do not have separate offices where the heads of the suicide-bomber squadron kindly requests an audience with the minister of interior affairs, or vice versa.