The 'Oh yes it IS' Bill

 In last Sunday's The Week in Westminster they were discussing the rights and wrongs of the Rwanda 'policy'...

<oh-yeah>
(less of a policy, it seems to me, than a gamble on the possible outcome of a tiny symbolic gesture)
</oh-yeah>

.... Sir Robert Buckland ...

<autobiographical-note>
(any relation, I wonder, of Graham Buckland, with whom I used to sing in Corpus Chapel Choir?)
</autobiographical-note>

... repeated the view reported in the Evening Standard last week:

“The ECHR [HD: European Court of Human Rights] underpins the very fabric of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement,” he told the BBC Sunday Politics programme.

He added: “To ignore that reality in the context of a debate about migration would be to threaten and endanger the Good Friday/Belfast process and once again undermine the position of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom.

“I think it would be a foolish or rash move… the wrong step and a very un-Conservative step for colleagues to take bearing in mind it was Conservative lawyers and politicians who helped draft the convention in those years after the war.

The 'Oh yes it IS' Bill responds to the Supreme Court's ruling that the policy would be illegal because Rwanda was not safe, by hastily throwing some more money at Rwanda...

<weasel-words>
(Of course the official line is that they're not spending any more. But there are new procedures and restrictions that will inevitably mean more money is spent – not to mention the ongoing legal costs (millions) foreseen by Geoffrey Robertson KC in a recent World at One.)
</weasel-words>

 ...and decreeing that oh yes it is, so that's all right

But this one will run and run; it's a moving target. Latest news is that the Immigration Minister...

<parenthesis>
(whose name I can't dissociate from the smell of pilchards, because of a near-pun: 

 

</parenthesis>

... having introduced the Bill, has disavowed it as insufficiently inhumane and done a runner to the back benches to plot with Attila the Hen.

It's hard not to agree with Alastair Campbell in last week's The Rest Is Politics that the Tories have given up on governing and are spending their inevitable last few months laying political traps for an incoming Labour administration.

<image authorship="mine not Campbell's>
(Not unlike the Wagner group pulling out of Ukraine but leaving behind a devil's brew of booby traps and landmines)
</image> 

But I've got better things to do than chart the hissy-fits of HMG, notably, preparation for this:

It's already selling well, and should be a blast. Hokum all ye faithful.

b