Asylum in the UK
The Rwanda “Policy,” dreamed up by Boris Johnson during his sojourn at Number Ten, while spaffing champagne at one of a series of illegal lockdown parties, has now another 48 hours before it is gratefully tossed to the long grass and buried. The only service it performed, to appease public anxieties about so called illegal immigration, dead in the water like the many victims of the people smugglers.
The Performative cruelty of the Rwanda gimmick was never going to make any kind of dent in the ever rising backlog of unprocessed claims… 85,000 and rising.
And there should be no illusions about this. The half built Rwandan centre is not, and never was, a processing centre and never was intended as such. The concept was to circumvent the ability of the entirely legal process of seeking asylum from taking place at all.
Rwanda is not a safe country whether we pretend it is or not. The UK continues to accept Rwandans as legal asylum seekers because their country is unsafe. The left hand apparently doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. For the one person personally bribed with thousands of pounds to go to Rwanda, even though he wanted to go anyway, and who has farcically since disappeared, we have accepted over a dozen Rwandans in return. That the whole scheme is less than half baked, is indefensibly ridiculous has become blindingly obvious to even those who initially attempted to flog it to a jaw-slacked media.
One calculation is that for each refugee sent to Rwanda it would cost the taxpayer £1.6m and if it were ever enacted that figure would likely prove to be a gross underestimate.
Initially it was claimed that this scheme was to end the backlog but then someone did the sums and worked out that if even the max conceivable of 5000 seekers would cost half a billion pounds then 85,000 would be more billions than they could afford, much less as a Daily Mail headline, so the deterrence posture was invented. But when there is a less than a 1% chance that any immigrant will be sent to Rwanda, then it’s not so much a deterrent, as free advertising for the people-smugglers, surely? Hey ho
Maybe a little more work could be finally done to stop making life so hellish, bombing the shit out of blameless civilians, that as a result, fewer of them decide to risk their lives to become refugees in the first place? Or is that making too much sense to ever be considered?