The sinister ramblings of a desperate lunatic

Rishi Sunak's emergency address in response to George Galloway's Rochdale by-election win made him look weak, desperate, and profoundly sinister.

It’s unclear what Rishi Sunak was hoping to achieve by dressing up what was essentially a political toddler tantrum at George Galloway’s Rochdale by-election win the night before as a serious emergency address on extremism, but he ended up making himself look weak, desperate, and profoundly sinister.

I’m not going to go through the entire speech line by line because a lot of it was nationalistic flannel and transparently fake words of conciliation to pad the thing out and soften the profoundly anti-British undertones of what he was actually saying.

When it comes to political analysis the most interesting bits are quite often the bits they try to hide, so we should probably start there.

If you look up the transcript of the speech on the official gov.uk website, you’ll find this interesting redaction between Sunak’s invocation of Lindsay Hoyle’s Islamophobic panic-mongering conspiracy theory and a load of pointless fluff about how wonderful Britain is.

The redacted political content refers to the part of the speech where Sunak made his anti-democratic denunciation of George Galloway’s Rochdale by-election win as "beyond alarming", which came just moments after warning that our democracy is under threat!

What does democracy even mean if it’s not accepting a democratic election result despite your political party stumbling home in a distant third place?

In what way is it "democratic" for a Prime Minister to call an emergency address in order to abuse his position and rabble-rouse against a democratically elected parliamentary opponent?

And isn’t it strange how all reference to the primary reason Sunak decided to make his speech at that particular moment ended up getting scrubbed out of it on the government’s own website?

For much of his speech Sunak invokes "Britishness" and "British values" without giving any recognition of how out of touch his genocide complicity makes him with these values he claims to support and uphold.

71% of the British public want the Israeli atrocities in Gaza to stop, yet Sunak outright refuses to call Israeli "genocide" and "war crimes" what they are; orders British diplomats at the UN to abstain on ceasefire motions backed by most of the rest of the world; and continues signing off on arms exports to the barbaric regime that’s committing the obscene atrocities that the majority of decent British people are disgusted by.

One of the main reasons George Galloway won the Rochdale by-election is that his vehement condemnations of Israeli atrocities actually aligns with British values, while the genocide complicity of Sunak and Starmer is completely at odds with what the decent humane majority of Brits want.

Galloway didn’t just win the Rochdale by-election, Sunak and Starmer were absolutely trounced. The combined Labour-Tory vote share in the constituency collapsed from 82.8% of the vote in 2019 to just 19.7%.

By conflating Galloway’s win with anti-British values, what Sunak was insinuating is that the people of Rochdale who turned their backs on the establishment parties in such overwhelming numbers are guilty of anti-Britishness.

He didn’t exactly spell it out, but the insinuation was obvious: 'If you don’t vote for us, you’re anti-British'.

Then Sunak tried to create alarm by claiming that extremists are "hostile to our values and have no respect for our democratic traditions" …

But who is the one ignoring the overwhelming public consensus that Britain should be doing everything in its power to stop the Israeli atrocities, rather than providing diplomatic cover for them; refusing to call them what they are; and supplying the regime that’s committing them with even more weapons?

Who is the one abusing his position to deliberately undermine the legitimacy of a free and fair election because he didn’t like the result?

And who is the one pledging ever harsher restrictions on the long-standing democratic British rights to free speech and non-violent political protest?

Sunak’s framing is beyond absurd. He casts the majority of British people as "extremists" for wanting the atrocities to stop, and portrays himself as a defender of British values for continuing to belligerently defy British public opinion.

He claims that these so-called extremists "want us to doubt ourselves, to doubt each other, to doubt our country’s history and achievements" and that "when these groups claim that Britain is and has been on the wrong side of history, we should reject it, and reject it again".

But everyone bar the most extreme of British nationalist revisionists knows that Britain’s history had some incredibly dark chapters: The transatlantic slave trade; colonial oppression; deliberate starvation of civilians in Ireland and India; genocide; concentration camps in Kenya and South Africa; the theft of Palestine; collusion with dictators and tyrants whenever it’s suited the interests of the British establishment order; the use of chemical weapons; the torture and mass killing of people fighting to liberate themselves from British colonial rule …

However it’s not all bad. Britain abolished the slave trade; it eventually withdrew its imperialist armies from most of the territories it occupied; it finally eschewed chemical weapons and signed international treaties banning their use; and one of the greatest achievements of all came when the fierce Labour and Tory rivals Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee worked together to deliver the European Convention on Human Rights, which laid the foundation of the liberal international order of human rights that the countries of the world are expected to abide by today.

These days British people take these human rights and international obligations as given. They believe that genocide and war crimes are abhorrent, and they believe that people have the right to speak out and protest against genocide without subjugation and persecution by their government.

This isn’t the kind of British history or British values Sunak is talking about.

After all, he’s the guy leading the political party full of raving lunatics that want to demolish Churchill and Attlee’s legacy by withdrawing the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights, which only Putin’s Russia and the fascist Greek dictatorship of the 1970s have ever done since the ECHR was created.

Sunak is the guy who keeps on selling weapons to a regime that’s defying international law in front of the eyes of the world by killing tens of thousands of civilians; looting and destroying their homes; deliberately targeting prominent medics, journalists, academics and their families; demolishing schools and hospitals; and collectively punishing Palestinians by starving them and then using aid convoy trucks as bait to massacre them.

To pretend that British rulers never committed any wrongs in all of history is as ridiculous as to pretend that Sunak isn’t making a grave error in judgement in the present with his genocide complicity.

Sunak’s definition of British values is clearly not just at odds with British public opinion, but with the established liberal democratic values that have been enshrined since the end of the Second World War, and which he claims to be a champion of!

Sunak used his speech to fulminate about how "divisive" opponents of his genocide complicity are, but if he had even the slightest capacity for self-reflection he’d see that it’s his genocide complicity, and the obscene Islamophobic panic-mongering of the party he leads that’s causing the biggest divisions.

From his tone it seemed like Sunak was trying to come across as a "hard but fair" leader who is putting his foot down under extreme provocation, but he abjectly failed to pull it off.

Truly strong leaders do not need to create absurdly fictional accounts of their nation’s history to stave off criticism.

Truly strong leaders don’t make sinister threats to even further restrict people’s historic rights to free speech and peaceful protest, and if they have an argument to make they win it by the power of persuasion, not by intimidation and brute force.

Truly strong leaders don’t need to spread Islamophobic conspiracy theories to pretend that democratic processes turned to farce because of unspecified threats from unspecified people, when anyone can see that the farcical scenes were actually caused purely because powerful establishment figures outright refused to call Israeli genocide and war crimes what they are.

Truly strong leaders don’t let a load of their subordinates get away with spewing racist rubbish, deranged conspiracy theories, and outright lies because they’re terrified of triggering a backlash from the lunatic fringe of their own party.

Truly strong leaders don’t falsely malign the majority of their country’s population as "extremists" simply because they oppose genocide complicity.

And truly strong leaders don’t panic and abuse their position to undermine inconvenient democratic election results while simultaneously pretending to be champions of democracy.

Sunak seemed to want to make himself look strong, but he ended up making himself look incredibly weak: Scared of democracy, scared of accountability, scared of the truth, and scared that the British people he claims to be proud to represent are going to be extremely glad to see the back of him.