Apparently we’re to send refugees to Rwanda. What an excellent fantasy, Johnson. Disturbing for the government to play that card though.
It’ll be no surprise there are sharper politicians than David Cameron. He had a problem with Tory backbench ‘Eurosceptics’, a fringe bunch of irrelevants who disguised their xenophobia as a rational dislike not of all other people, or a group of other people, but of a bureaucracy. He thought a referendum on their whines would be conclusively beaten and shut them up for good.
Given that this was what it was all about he was surprisingly unprepared when they played the racism card: immigration and immigrants (permanently ‘illegal-‘) were drummed up into consistent news. The EU was already a proxy for all bloody foreigners, Conservative heartland is The Daily Mail and Express, and he’d just had a trial run with our Nationalistas playing the Anglophobic card in the Scottish secession referendum, so he should have known better. But hey, not the sharpest spoon in the drawer.
Brexit was lost because a bunch of xenophobes couched racism in rationale, and shouted it.
Honest Boris the Clown Johnson noticed what a great distraction it can be however. He jumped on a campaign looking for a leader and must’ve momentarily looked away from the mirror to note their tactics.
Six years on there’s a scandal about the first ever Prime Minister to be done for a criminal offence in office. The natives, the newspapers and the Tory backbench are restless. Something must be done.
Shiti Patel – one of the nastiest UK Home Secretaries in a long time, but not in the intellectual First Division – announced yesterday that the UK will send refugees to Rwanda ‘for processing’, with no option to ever come to the UK.
There have been queues decrying this abhorrent and ludicrous idea. The media has been replete with experts and the principled explaining the legal, financial and moral unfeasibility. The churches are aghast. International organisations have been explaining our agreed responsibilities. It’s illegal under international law, it would be horrendously expensive, and it’s just wrong.
People in unknown potentially horrendous situations should be given a fair hearing. Taking care of people in distress is the right thing to do, that’s why we made it law. We are obligated to offer them protection if we can (and we definitely can) first and assess the truth of their story second. The world signed the treaties on this after, in disgust at our behaviour of refusing entry to NAZI victims before we emptied them from the crematoria.
So where does Patel’s silly idea come from? Honest Boris and his Merry Men’s story is that not ever being allowed into the UK will deter refugees coming via dangerous routes. They think this will make them sound firm but caring. They also know it sounds to many like Trump’s wall. But they also know it will whip up a lot of acrimonious shouting, and the Sending Foreigners to Africa racial connotations will elevate the volume. And the ‘caring’ touch gives them all cover.
Johnson’s forebears (like Farage) knew they could tickle an innocent hint and the UK Bigot Media would roll out a racist bandwagon for the ignorant to jump on. This is an old trick. Hitler and Mussolini used it, but it’s fuelled pogroms since time began.
The other (very old) trick is distraction. Johnson has a problem, so make a noise to distract from it. The racist bit is just the trick to make the noise very loud and distracting.
My guess is that – despite their vacuity – the government know sending refugees to Rwanda is going nowhere. Even Honest Boris’ Simpleton Squad must be aware the legal, practical, huge financial and political difficulties of this make it a non-starter. It’ll go for a review or two and be disappointedly dropped. But it will have taken a lot of the Partygate hot air with it.
It’s a shame he had to play the race card. That lowers the acceptability bar on the next incitement. In the long run it brings the next pogrom nearer.
[23/04/2022]
The Economist makes a good point in an editorial this week. Patel’s proposal is essentially paying to outsource our responsibility to refugees. If rich countries can do this it divides the world into The Payers and The Refugee Recipients. We would be setting a precedent making it acceptable for the rich to never receive refugees again.