I wish I didn’t keep having to highlight the stupidity and incompetence of the UK Government, but they will keep lobbing easy balls for me to take a smash at. In an attempt to divert attention from the fact that Boris is the first PM in the UK ever to have broken the law (and lied about it, or dodged it with a claim of ignorance), the Government is trying to bolster up its natural support ahead of what could be a calamitous set of local elections.
For the average Tory supporter, nothing pleases them more than hearing about a crackdown on immigration. The Daily Mail journalists salivate when a juicy anti-immigrant story comes up (and the only thing that could keep it off the front page is if there was some scandal going on with a Royal). So the Government has decided to export immigrants to Rwanda.
The plan is that when illegal immigrants (those being the ones that come over on boats across the channel without having spent the last six months filling out a Visa form and waiting for the Home Office to process it) arrive on our shores, they’ll get a one-way ticket to Rwanda to start a new life. Never mind that many of the immigrants have come FROM Africa in the first place, or that Rwanda was in the news for its internal genocide activities in 1994 that even now create demographic challenges. The UK Government’s own advice page on visiting Rwanda warns against a heightened threat of terrorist activity, and also warns about expressing any criticism of its President Paul Kagame – critics tend to mysteriously disappear. The UN has well-documented cases of human rights violations.
Perhaps I’m being harsh: I mean, in the 19th century, Britain deported unwanted citizens to Australia, and that worked out well in the end. For Australia.
The arguments against it are cumulatively huge: the Home Office is bracing itself for legal challenges which could tie up for years attempts to implement this deportation policy (Priti Useless Patel nevertheless has vowed to take on the “lefty lawyers” who have the temerity to take on clients who need representation to prevent abuses of their human rights); and the warnings from the UN that it could be illegal; and the condemnation from the Archbishop of Canterbury that this is “against the nature of God”; and the opposition from within the Home office for the policy (which Priti Useless Patel, with her history of bullying her staff, just ignored); and the fact that the financial case for this has been hasty and lacks detailed analysis (though naturally Ministers claim without any reliable justification that we will be “better off in the long run”); and the fact that it’s expensive from the start (Rwanda gets a one-off £120m just for agreeing to receive them, plus £20k per person sent); and the fact that we have a resourcing crisis in the Border Force department who would presumably process all these immigrants (they can’t even manage passport applications for its own citizens, so what chance do undocumented aliens have?).
One feeble justification offered to us is that this will hit back at the people smugglers who provide the flimsy boats that people use to make the journey to the UK. Perhaps that’s why they chose land-locked Rwanda to export everyone to. Quite how the Government thinks this will affect the smugglers is unclear. Do they think this will reduce the demand for journeys to the UK? Given how badly the UK is doing in providing for its citizens (except for Boris’ mates of course), it’s worth noting that situations in the immigrants’ native countries must be horrendous for them to want to come here anyway.
But never mind the cost, the insensitivity of the way we treat people who are desperate, and the sheer cheek of thinking that we can outsource this particular problem to make it go away – it’ll play well with the Tory faithful. Easy to see where this Government’s priorities lie.
Martin B Lewis 