Farrukh Dhondy | Did Sunak ‘lie’ in UK TV debate? Immigration still poll hot button…

Which yields nectar to the cup

It’s but a metaphor, a sign,

They plead with Saki to fill up

The Chalice they believe is God’s

Divine Unity with their soul…

Oh Bachchoo, calculate the odds

Of Unity being beyond control?”

From The Must Calendar, by Bachchoo

The 2024 elections are upon us in this year of world democracy. In Africa, eighteen countries go to the polls, in America fourteen, in Asia twenty-one, in Europe twenty-nine and then there’s Australia and four Pacific territories.

The Mexican, South African and Indian ones are over, disappointing some and causing others to declare triumphs of democracy. I’ll stay schtum -- two of these are none of my business and one has to be so careful nowadays!

But then I have a vote in the July 4 UK general election. The campaigns of the parties are in full flow and various polls put Labour ahead of the Tories by 20 or 17 points.

The first TV debate of this election campaign between Hedgie Soongone and Unkleir Starmer, the Labour leader, took place on Tuesday. Hedgie repeatedly needled Unkleir, passing a campaigning message to the studio and viewing audiences, saying that an independent review of tax pledges undertaken by the civil service predicts that Labour would put up taxes for every household by £2,000 a year. He repeated this taunt several times with something of a challenging smirk on his face.

The next morning the newspapers and channels revealed that Hedgie had been, at best, “misleading the public” and at worst “lying through his teeth”. They had discovered that James Bowler, the chief Treasury civil servant, had emphatically asserted in writing that the Treasury’s civil service had made no such calculation or claim.

So, even if 51 per cent of viewers thought that Hedgie had done better than Unklier in the debate, the revelation that he had taunted the latter with a lie should now widen the gap in Labour’s favour. Or does the British electorate want a PM with his ankle-length pants on fire?

In another peculiar incident, Hedgie was being interviewed on some right-wing platform by a journalist interviewer called Piers Morgan -- widely seen as Mr Vainglory himself. These bods, talking about Hedgie’s vow to send illegal immigrants on flights to Rwanda, ventured into a bet. Morgan bet Hedgie £1,000 that the flights would not take off before the election. This was noted by the media. Hedgie is the richest PM Britain has had and £1,000 is probably what he pays for a pair of designer underpants. Morgan is not short of a penny or two either. Then Hedgie calls the election and says the Rwanda plan will be implemented after it.

Naturally, Morgan asks for the “grand” which Hedgie owes him as a result of “losing” the bet. Hedgie shamelessly protests that he won the bet because some weeks ago, one of these illegal immigrants, whose asylum claim failed, had volunteered to go to Rwanda and the Home Office gave him £3,000 to get on a flight. Hedgie said this was tantamount to his Rwanda deportation pledge working so he wouldn’t pay up. This was at best disingenuous and Piers Morgan protested in print.

As I said, the one grand is as nothing to either of these punters. They should, to my mind, have taken a bet which would really contain some jeopardy. They could, for instance, have wagered that the loser would get on a flight to Rwanda and stay there with his family and perhaps even with his associates -- Hedgie with Cruella Braverman, Ugly Patel, Clair Coutinho and a few others -- and Morgan with the owners of and the presenter-colleagues on the right-wing TV channels for which he works or worked. None of them will be missed.

And that, gentle reader, is enough of one loser (as Donald Wigwarm calls his opponents), and so on to the next who has, after insisting he would not, U-turnly announced his candidature for the parliamentary seat of Clacton in the East of England. This is Nigel Farage, who formed the UKIP party which advocated a stronger Brexit than Boris Johnson at the time. The Party then became the Brexit Party and later called itself “Reform”, its present name under whose banner Farage is standing. The Trumpeting epithet can be legitimately and literally applied to him as poor Nigel has stood in seven public elections, five for Westminster, and lost them all.

His first policy announcement on entering the fray was that his party would immediately stop all immigration, illegal and, under the comprehensive statement, possibly even the “legal” ones. No Johnny foreigner here!

He hasn’t said how he’d stop the wretched of the earth -- and some chancers looking for a better life -- coming over on boats. Would he get the Royal Navy or the Coast Guard to drown the boats by firing on them? Would he more humanely apprehend every boat and get the Navy to sail them off to Robinson Crusoe island or dump them on some other nation’s unmanned shore? Of course, closing down all British work visa and student visa departments worldwide would stop the “legals” coming over also.

Ho hum -- Reform won’t form a government. Not now, and from the evidence of the British electorate in the past, ignoring the fascist Oswald Mosley and sending the xenophobe Enoch Powell to virtual exile as a Northern Ireland MP, not ever.