THE government’s proposal to capture single male asylum-seekers who arrive on our shores and warehouse them in Rwanda while their asylum applications are sorted offends at so many levels that we must wonder at the tortured thought processes which led ministers to this conclusion.
Human empathy for the distraught and traumatised victims of the wars, invasions and imperial interventions in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Ukraine is completely absent.
Almost all the people fleeing the wars, plagues and disasters — human and climatic — inflicted on them have a compelling reason to come here beyond the disasters they leave behind.
It may be that they speak our language, not surprising as so many people have lived under British colonial rule or imperial domination. It may be that they have family and friends here. Again not so surprising for similar reasons.
Our sympathy for all those seeking refuge must be necessarily indiscriminate and our obligations under international convention make this clear.
Nevertheless, beyond the human solidarity which motivates the very many people who welcome refugees and migrants, there is a clear recognition that we citizens of the second most powerful imperial power in the world have special obligations.
Because of the responsibility of successive British government for the tensions on Nato’s ever-extending borders, our obligations to Ukrainians who seek refuge here, including single men who may be fleeing conscription into a venture for which they have no sympathy, must be met.
It is an unpleasant thought but one compelling answer to the question of why ministers are proposing this course of action is precisely because they want a toxic and bad-tempered debate to displace attention from the Tories’ “partygate” fines.
As the Tories’ problems accumulate, we must expect more such “dead cat” stratagems.
The pathology of Priti Patel’s peculiar politics is undoubtedly an issue here. Her stewardship of the Home Office has been marked by, one one hand a steadily increasingly hostile climate for refugees and migrants and on the other, a more or less complete failure to manage the human flows across the English Channel with either efficiency or humanity.
This is an impossible task given the contradictory factors at play in the government’s calculations.
A hostile environment for refugees and migrants is coupled with its management of a deregulated labour market in which migrant flows are an active factor in an economically and politically coerced movement of labour that drives down wage costs and raises profits. We have a particularly blatant case with the P&O sackings.
But this is not just down to Patel. The Tories as a whole and Boris Johnson in particular have made it absolutely clear that for them the issues of migration and refugees are not necessarily a numbers game — after all they view with equanimity the potential migration of untold thousands of people from the former colonial possession of Hong Kong.
Migrants and refugees are political footballs to be kicked around without regard for the human consequences. It is a peculiarly irresponsible government which generates policies as obnoxiously maladroit as this bizarre Rwanda scheme and does so without thinking through how much it could cost.
Labour’s ambiguity over migration makes the whole issue politically attractive to the Tories and as an election comes closer we can be sure they — aided by our peculiarly venal mass media — will find every opportunity to exploit unprincipled compromise and evasive ambiguity on these questions.
The starting point for a humane, efficient and progressive policy must be a realistic and credible response from the labour movement. It won’t come from anywhere else in British society.
