It's widely accepted that Priti Patel is one of the least intelligent members of the least talented government this country has ever suffered, but once again she's made an absolute fool of herself.
You'll probably already be familiar with some of her other blunders, like claiming that applying the death penalty to innocent people would serve as a deterrent, getting caught working as an agent for another state embedded within the UK government, and being unable to read a six digit number off a piece of paper.
Her error this time is particularly sinister and disturbing because it highlights the fact that she has absolutely no understanding of the fundamental basics of how the criminal justice system functions in a liberal democracy.
Patel's latest blunder came about when she put political pressure on the Chief Constable of Avon and Somerset police to ensure criminal prosecution of the activists who took down the statue of Tory slave-trader Edward Colston over the weekend.
This is simply not how the law works, and this kind of political interference represents a dangerous step towards police state authoritarianism.
The way it's supposed to work is that the police conduct an investigation, and then pass their evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service.
The CPS then make a decision whether to bring the case to trial, based on considerations such as the likelihood of conviction, and whether a trial would actually be in the public interest.
The legitimate role of the government, and specifically the Home Secretary, is to propose new laws, and alterations of existing laws, which are obviously subject to parliamentary approval before they can be enacted.
A legitimate position for the Home Secretary to take would be to argue that the current laws prohibiting vandalism of public monuments are not strong enough, and to propose new legislation.
It's completely illegitimate for the Home Secretary to put pressure on the police or the CPS in order to demand prosecutions, because then any case that is brought, can obviously be perceived as politically motivated.
And once we slip into the territory of politically motivated prosecutions, we end up with political prisoners, meaning we're living in a police state.
Patel is obviously far to dim to understand any of this, but ever since the Stalinist Cummings Purge of the 21 liberal-capitalist Tory MPs in September 2019, the Tory party is even more bereft of talent than it was before.
I'm obviously no huge fanboy for purged Tories like David Gauke, Ken Clarke, Rory Stewart, Justine Greening, Dominic Grieve, Philip Hammond ... but at least these individuals would have been somewhat more likely to actually understand a little bit about the history and structure of the legal system, and the critical importance of avoiding political interference in the application of justice.
The fact of the matter is that if the protesters who organised the statue removal are found, and prosecuted, they can easily demonstrate that the prosecution was politically motivated, thanks to Patel, and then portray themselves as political prisoners if they're convicted.
I'd actually expect black civil rights campaigners to be queuing up to face such a ludicrous prosecution, because the prospect of being jailed for opposing slavery, in a politically partisan trial, would obviously create a powerful martyrdom narrative and turn their predicament into an instant cause célèbre.
Furthermore, conviction at the behest of a right-wing government would make a powerful demonstration of the systemic racism that the Black Lives Matter protesters were protesting against in the first place!
So whichever way you look at it, Patel has screwed up.
If you're you're even remotely liberal, you'll be opposed to politically motivated prosecutions as a matter of principle.
And if you're of the authoritarian persuasion, and want to see the statue-removers punished, then Patel's politicisation of the process has made the prospect of a reasonable conviction all the more difficult than it already was!
As ludicrous as this situation is, it's also deeply concerning, because once again we're an absolute laughing stock of a country, with a profoundly unintelligent and disturbingly authoritarian Home Secretary who demonstrably doesn't give the slightest damn about how the law is supposed to work in liberal democracies.
Any reasonable person, of any political persuasion (other than rabid right-wing authoritarianism) must be left wondering how on earth we've sunk so low.
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On Sunday June 7th 2020 anti-racism protesters tore down the Edward Colston statue in Bristol and threw it into Bristol Harbour. Many would argue that this represented a fitting end for a statue of a slave trader whose ships threw 19,000 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean.
The outraged Tory reaction to the removal of this slave trader statue is an absolutely telling demonstration of their militant ‘property above people’ ideology.
In the midst of a huge global uprising against racism, you might have thought that the Tories would have tried to keep a low profile, given their very recent history of implementing unlawful systematically racist policies, and the racist words and actions of their leader. But no, they couldn’t help themselves.
The unlawfully racist Tory Hostile Environment resulted in the systematic persecution of black British citizens. They were denied housing, employment, social security, banking services, and even life saving medical treatment. Scores were even deported, with several actually dying in exile overseas.
But Tory MPs have more tears for the fallen statue of a historical slave trader than for the thousands of real life victims of their own Windrush scandal!
We all know the Tories love a statue of a racist, because in the middle of the 2019 General Election campaign Boris Johnson and a load of other senior Tories flocked to Plymouth to pay homage to a statue of the notorious antisemite and anti-black racist Nancy Astor.
Not only was Astor a vile fascist sympathiser and antisemite who described Adolf Hitler as a welcome solution to the “world problem of Jews”, she also told a room full of African Americans that they should be “grateful for slavery”!
It’s absolutely beyond question that Tories see more value in statues of racists, than in the actual lives of the people who have suffered at the hands of slave traders, fascists, antisemites, and their own racist policies of systematic anti-black discrimination.
The rhetoric they’ve used to defend their beloved slave-trader statue gives a horrifying insight into the Tory mindset.
Their primary tactic has been to adopt the ludicrous pretence that removing monuments and statues to discredited figures and ideologies equates to erasure of history, which is a ludicrously weak argument.
Did these Tories cry bitter tears of frustration about the erasure of history when monuments to Lenin were torn down in post-Soviet Russia? Of course they didn’t.
Did they howl with outrage when the statue of Saddam Hussain was torn down in Baghdad, and the symbols of Ba’athism were destroyed across Iraq? Of course they didn’t.
Did they vehemently object the erasure of history when statues and monuments to Jimmy Savile were removed after his depraved crimes came to light? Of course they didn’t.
Would they argue that it was wrong to remove all the Swastikas and monuments to Hitler after the defeat of Nazi Germany? Because any kind of consistent application of their erasure of history principle suggests they believe Germany should still be covered in the iconography of Nazi Germany, and Russia should still be covered in the symbolism of the Soviet Union.
Then there’s the nonsensical demand that people should have just waited for politicians to sort it out, rather than taking matters into their own hands.
The problem of course is that the people of Bristol left it in the hands of the politicians to sort out, and instead of taking the required action of calmly taking the statue down, moving it somewhere appropriate (like a slavery museum) and then replacing it with a monument to the victims of the transatlantic slave trade, they spent literally years debating the precise wording of a plaque to be attached to the plinth!
And the local council allowed the slavery apologists at the Society of Merchant Venturers more say on the wording of the plaque than black civil rights activists in the city, or even the mayor!
No wonder people got sick of the political game-playing and eventually took matters into their own hands.
Another problem with the Tory erasure of history attack line is the fact that in one single day the removal of the statue did more to raise public awareness about Britain’s participation in the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade than leaving the statue in place for another century would have done (ridiculous plaque or not).
As David Olusoga pointed out, the removal of the statue wasn’t erasure of history, it was actually a defining moment of history.
And if the Tories really gave a damn about the erasure of history where were their torrents of outrage when the Windrush boarding cards were destroyed by the Home Office, or when the national records were vandalised to erase Britain’s colonial crimes?
The Tory objections to the destruction of actual historical records were non-existent of course, because they don’t mind history being erased if erasing it suits their purposes, and because their erasure of history argument is obviously just disingenuous nonsense to obscure the actual reason they’re enraged by the removal of a slave trader statue.
Perhaps the most despicable Tory argument of all is the way they invoked the Holocaust Museum at Auschwitz as if it constitutes some kind of direct comparison.
’If the Auschwitz concentration camp wasn’t demolished, how dare you pull down our slave trader statue?’
The answer of course is that Auschwitz was preserved as a memorial museum about the Holocaust, while the Edward Colston statue was erected as a memorial to a slave trader.
You’d have to be disgustingly ignorant, or wilfully obtuse to treat them as identical cases.
But what’s even more sickening than this grotesquely misleading comparison in itself, is the way that Tories will dredge up the suffering of one people, in order to whitewash the suffering of another.
Let’s remind Jewish people of the horrors of the Holocaust in our hastily constructed, and searingly incoherent justification of a modern day monument to a slave trader!
The Tory reaction to the removal of this slave trader statue has been divisive, deluded, depraved, and above all disingenuous.
It’s divisive because demanding that memorials to slave-traders should be left standing is an insult to all right-minded people who object to the Tory ‘property above people’ mentality, it’s a spit in the eye for black Brits, and it's especially insulting to the African American and Caribbean descendants of the victims of the transatlantic slave trade.
It's deluded because leaving it to the politicians resulted in endless naval gazing over the precise wording of a stupid little plaque, rather than the required action of just calmly taking it down and replacing it with a memorial to the victims of slavery.
It’s depraved because the logical conclusion of their erasure of history argument would mean leaving Swastikas over Germany, the Saddam Hussain statue in Baghdad, and all the Jimmy Savile statues and monuments that used to be dotted around Leeds.
And above all it’s disingenuous because whatever rhetoric they're spouting to oppose the removal of this statue, the real reason they're so furious is that slave-trader Colston was a Tory MP, and they see the removal of this monument to one of their beloved Tory brethren as an attack on Toryism.
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