Lee Anderson: Spare a thought for the wee soul

The Conservative rebellion against the UK Government's new Rwanda bill evaporated yesterday, with fewer Tory back benchers voting against the bill than Number 10 had feared.

Spare a thought for poor sensitive wee soul 30p Lee Anderson, who had got himself all worked up and ready to rebel against the bill on the grounds that it wasn't cruel and racist enough, but in the event couldn't bring himself to vote against the bill because Labour MPs were laughing at him. Awww diddums.

The torments that asylum seekers have to face as they leave everything behind and risk their lives attempting to cross the English Channel in overcrowded small boats are as nothing to the torture that brave Lee copes with as he is confronted with the giggles of opposition MPs.

That's the kind of fortitude that led GB News to give Lee a gig as a presenter for a reported £100,000 a year even though he'd not long condemned MPs who take second jobs.

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Lee had resigned as deputy chairman of the Conservative party over the Rwanda bill "as a matter of principle".

Conservative principles, that's those political beliefs you can ditch the moment that the opposition laugh at you.

It was not that long ago that big butch macho Lee offering to fight to all and sundry. Turns out he wet himself and ran away because a few labour MP’s laughed at him.

Although the revolt by right wing Tory MPs collapsed because they turned out to be pathetic snowflakes whose feelings were hurt, Sunak is not out of the woods yet.

The bill still has to pass through the Lords, and today a leading member of the Lords, prominent barrister and cross-bench peer, Alex Carlile, condemned the government's Rwanda bill as a "step towards totalitarianism" and signalled that the House of Lords plans to resist the legislation.

Carlile said that the bill was an attempt by the government to put itself above the law and speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme said:  said: "Many of the lawyers in the House of Lords will say this is a step too far. This is an illegitimate interference by politics with the law on an issue that can be solved in other ways."

Meanwhile there are reports that an undisclosed number of Conservative MPs have submitted letters of no confidence in the Prime Minister to the chair of the 1922 Committee.

Would the Tories be insane enough to dethrone Sunak?

That would have been unthinkable just a couple of years ago but the Tories have now become so unmoored from reality that no one can rule it out.

Panic amongst Tory MPs is only growing as opinion polls pile up showing a truly dire set of electoral prospects for their party.

To add to Sunak's woes about his immigration policy, the UK Government has been reprimanded by the UK Statistics Authority for lying.

On the second of January, the Home Office announced that it had cleared the legacy backlog of asylum claims, which were defined as asylum claims submitted before June 2022, when the current Nationality and Borders Act came into force.

Sunak took to social media to claim that the whole of the backlog had been cleared. The Home Office was soon forced to admit that 4500 "particularly complex" cases had still not been resolved. However there remains a backlog of over 100,000 cases.

Now Sir Robert Chote, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority, has released a letter saying people may have been misled and that the claims from the PM and the Home Office may have undermined trust in the government.

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Following on from last week's mega poll which showed that the Tories are heading for a historic drubbing at the next general election, a new poll from YouGov out today shows that the Labour party has extended its lead over Sunak to a massive 27%.

Sunak is now even less popular than Liz Truss. The latest poll puts the Conservatives on a paltry 20%, with Labour on 47%.

That is pretty dire, but the finding of this poll which will really alarm Tory MPs is that 12% of respondents report that they intend to vote for the far right Reform party which is the highest vote share ever recorded for the quasi fascist party in a YouGov poll.

This gives Tories nightmares that they will be squeezed between Labour on the left and Reform on the right, which could potentially result in an electoral meltdown from which the party might never recover.

Scottish ... Party

Speaking to the BBC journalist Nick Robinson, the First Minister has admitted that he has never been especially comfortable with the word "national" in the name of the SNP.

He said that said he did not like the connotations the word "nationalist" could have internationally and that the "national" in the SNP's name could be misinterpreted.

Indeed it is a common trope in Scottish politics for those parties which oppose Scottish independence to claim that they are opposed to "nationalism" and to pose as non-nationalists, even as they espouse Brexit demonise migrants, and wrap themselves in the British flag.

Both Labour and the Conservatives are nakedly nationalist parties even though they both strongly deny this, but it is a fundamental tenet of British nationalism that it is distinguished from the nationalism of lesser nations by virtue of not being nationalist at all.

The use of the word nationalist to describe independence supporters gives British nationalists a fig leaf behind which they can, with the active collusion of the British media hide their own right wing reactionary nationalism.