(Not) Leaving on a Jet Plane
Why the Rwanda Deportations are a Debacle Made in Hell
Pity the UK government. For weeks now, it has been desperately trying to deport refugees to Rwanda in an attempt to destroy the evil ‘people traffickers’ who ‘profit from misery’ by helping refugees reach our shores. Day and night Johnson and his ministers have been toiling away, with one thought on their minds: how to save the lives of the refugees crossing the Channel and destroy the ‘business model’ of the people who facilitate these journeys.
Such compassion is enough to bring a tear to the eye of the most hardened cynic. But what happens? At the very point when the government is about to send the first batch of refugees to Rwanda, their humanitarianism comes under wholesale attack from the likes of Gary Lineker, the Refugee Council, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and a host of ‘lefty’ lawyers.
Twenty-five bishops write a letter to the Times blathering on about ‘the vulnerable that the Old Testament calls us to value’ and comparing Iranians, Eritreans, and Sudanese citizens’ to ‘the people Jesus had in mind as he said when we offer hospitality to a stranger, we do it for him.’
As if! Then UNHCR criticised the policy, even though Priti Patel said only last week that the UNHCR was behind it. Was she lying? You at the back, sit down, because you are obviously no friend of this country.
Otherwise you would understand the cheek of the UN’s principal refugee organisation, in telling our government that the Rwanda deal is “at odds with States’ responsibility to take care of those in need of protection”, and that ‘People fleeing war, conflict and persecution deserve compassion and empathy’, and ‘should not be traded like commodities and transferred abroad for processing’.
As if wasn’t bad enough being lectured about Jesus by a bunch of bishops, or told how to treat refugees by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Prince Charles - Prince Charles I tell you - decides to indulge some lefty virtue signalling by leaking to the press that he considers the Rwanda policy ‘abhorrent’.
Naturally the government swatted these criticisms away. The Great Man himself insisted that his government would not be daunted or ‘abashed’ in pursuit of its noble objectives. And Liz Truss assured parliament that the Rwanda deportations are ‘completely moral.’
‘Completely’ moral, got that? And Priti Patel - Our Lady of the Borders - insisted that the Rwanda flights would ‘ultimately’ save lives.
That ‘ultimately’ is doing some hard work there, but never mind, because as always, these messages have been shared all over the Tory press and social media. Hurrah for our Rwanda policy! Hurraay! We’re deporting refugees who asked us for asylum to Rwanda! Aren’t we marvellous?
Brexit Redux
If nothing else, the Tory Party does propaganda well. And notice the messaging, because as Marshall McLuhan might have said, the messaging is actually more important than the policy itself. So we get this observation from Ipswich Tory MP Tom Hunt.
And Hunt again:
You have to love these Tory MPs, who only ever seem to care about GP appointments and school places when migrants or refugees are involved. And the inevitable Brendan Clark-Smith, another dismal product of the Generation of 2019, also joined in the chorus:
Fantastic news! And even John Deadwood, broke off from eating a roadkill and rambling about post-Brexit autarchy in his swamp-side shack, in order to berate ‘the bishops’ for opposing the Rwanda policy.
Only two things wrong here. One, most people who apply for asylum after crossing the Channel have their claims accepted. So they are not ‘economic migrants’. Secondly, there are no safe routes for the majority of people who make these journeys, which is precisely why they make them.
Beyond this lying chorus of the Tory damned, Twitter seethed with hatred and resentment of the ‘so-called refugees’, with messages like these:
There is a lot more where this came from, and these are precisely the people the Rwanda deportations are intended to appeal to, and the hateful sentiments that the government and its paid scriveners have deliberately tried to whip up. None of this has anything to do with humanitarianism or saving lives.
On Tuesday, as Tories and their supporters were baying for the first flight to take off to Rwanda, seven refugees, according to Sky News, were being kicked, pushed, and dragged out of detention to be taken to the airport by their feet, in some cases with ropes tied around them. These refugees included a former Iranian policeman, imprisoned and tortured by the regime for refusing to shoot at demonstrators in 2019.
‘Where is the humanity?’
Despite the protestations of the lefty bishops and liberal lawyers, and the so-called Refugee Council, seven refugees were taken to the ‘Privilege Style’ aircraft - no one can say the UK doesn’t do dystopia very well - ready to be flown to Kigali. And then, horror of horrors, the European Court of Human Rights blocked the flight while it was waiting for take off, which led immediately to headlines like this.
‘Where is the humanity in this?’ asked the newspaper which has done more than any other newspaper in British history to denigrate and dehumanise refugees and migrants at every era since the Mail came into existence. The answer to that question is not in the pages of the Daily Mail or in Downing Street, or in the Home Office.
It may or may not be true, as the New Statesman suggested, that the government actually expected the flight to be blocked by the EHCR, and welcomed the predictable outrage at the ‘Euro Court’ that this decision has generated.
But whether it was intentional or not, we are now back in Brexit Groundhog Day, as charlatans and demagogues like Douglas Murray and Nigel Farage call for Brexit to be ‘completed’, by leaving the ECHR, even though leaving it was never presented to the British public as an option.
So this is a row that the government is happy to have, partly as an immediate distraction from Johnson’s failing government, and possibly as part of a longer-term strategy to make everything about Brexit, forever, till the last syllable of recorded time.
Few of the ‘send them to Rwanda’ cheerleaders have considered the morality of the policy, or its effectiveness in its own terms, or its cost-effectiveness, and we shouldn’t be surprised that they don’t. The ‘world leading’ policy is aimed at a domestic audience and is designed mostly for domestic political reasons.
This is partly because the Vote Leave government that we have is an extremist right-wing populist government that, like its counterparts elsewhere, has a direct political interest in directing hatred at a vulnerable minority. If it can whip up hatred towards the ‘elitists’ that try to uphold the rule of law and a supposedly imperious ‘Euro court’ that violates our national sovereignty, so much the better.
So the Rwanda policy is not simply aimed at preventing prevent men and women from seeking the asylum that most of them would get, while simultaneously pretending to ‘save’ them from exploitation. It’s also a strategy of division. It aims to present a beleaguered and disgraced government as the brave defenders of ‘our borders’ against the ‘illegal immigrant’ invaders, and the domestic Europhile hordes who support them, and the European institutions that insist we meet the human rights obligations we voluntarily signed up to.
In other words, the Rwanda deportations are another instrument of ‘culture war’. They reach, coldly and deliberately, into the dankest recesses of the national psyche, and invite the population to celebrate the cruelty of the policy, and to revel in their own cruelty.
Like Orwell’s ‘two minute hates’, they aim to generate a spurious majoritarian unity, between the ruling party and the population. This is why it doesn’t actually matter if the policy ‘works’ as a deterrent, or not. It doesn’t need to ‘work’. If it creates the divisions it wants to create, then it is already succeeding.
This is, of course, a toxic and dangerous game, if you believe that principles such as human dignity and the principle of refugee protection are worth upholding. If you accept the Holocaust Rabbi Hugo Gryn’s suggestion that ‘how you are with the one to whom you owe nothing; that is a grave test and not only as an index of our tragic past’, then you don’t fly people off 10,000 miles away when they ask you for refuge.
But if your single principle is the survival of your leader and his government, you will do whatever it takes, no matter how cruel, and you will say whatever is required to conceal the cruelty that you are responsible for. You will claim to be ‘completely’ moral, even if you have no morals at all.
You will claim to be ‘ultimately’ saving lives, even though there is no evidence that you are doing anything of the kind.
That is what this government is doing. It twists the truth even as it twists the meanings of words. Many people will fall for this, but if we are to save this country from sinking any deeper into this disgrace, we need to show that there many, many more who don’t.
A disturbing and succinct analysis of a culture war stoked to keep the most tyrannical UK government in history in place. Johnson knew that the ECHR would block the deportations but pressed ahead anyway, all the time knowing that the distraction and division this would cause fitted his agenda perfectly. He will do and say anything to cling to power and will never resign. Our only hope is an election, an election he will try to rig: ID cards being but one example of eliminating dissenting voices.