The Rwanda Plan - Why?

[Cactus Jack]

For those not familiar with the story so far.

Priti Patel came up with scheme to send up to 200 people per year who arrived in the UK by 'irregular means' and have asked for asylum to Rwanda at a cost to the taxpayer of over £100 million.

In return the government of Rwanda can send an unspecified number of these claimants, or others who have never even asked for asylum in the UK, that it deems to be undesireable back to the UK.

This has been through various courts but the most recent was the UK Supreme Court - a court that you might correctly guess is a UK court - who have found it to be unlawful.

So now the UK government wants to scrap the UK laws that make it unlawful - some of which are laws that prevent detention without trial, guarantee fair access to legal representation and encode elements of internal law into UK law in compliance with some very long standing treaties - including but not limited to the Treaty of Vienna that protects UK embassies abroad - all of which would be repudiated if the bill went into law.

So the Tories want to send 200 people to Rwanda - who can if they wish send double that number back - and have been willing to pay more than £160 million to date for the privilege.

The outcome, if they were successful, would out UK international relations on a par with North Koreas and would strip UK citizens of rights they've had since 1215 AD (when the Magna Carta was signed)

Simple question. Why?

[Cherry de Voured]

Just my two cents (or rather, by the amount of text, fifteen quid):

Initially, it started as no more than a gimmick that wasn't meant to be taken all that seriously. Like much of the policy in the reign of Boris Johnson, it was a lot of bluster and showmanship - in this case, to appeal to the interminably thick that would lap it up, the right-side of the Conservatives that supported him, but also the more fair-minded who had more legitimate concerns about immigration.

I don't think they ever thought it was workable, and even so - two-hundred people, a drop in the ocean. It also had the added bonus of kicking the boot into the European Union (i.e. Court of Human Rights) to strengthen his pro-Brexit credentials, and help divert the blame for why Brexit has gone so terribly fucking wrong.

But then Boris gets the chop, Truss enters and sinks the economy, and Li'l Rishi takes over the reigns. Li'l Rishi is the scraping at the bottom of the barrel, because at the time, even the Tories weren't mad enough to put a complete lunatic in charge.

But Boris had a cult of personality, which is why he could make a sinking ship appear to be buoyant (at least for a while). Li'l Rishi doesn't, because he doesn't have a fucking personality. He can't rely on his credentials and record, because he was complicit in everything that went wrong with Boris Johnson (whilst simultaneously trying to distance himself from him), and therefore the disaster that was Truss.

He probably did start with good intentions, though. A sensible, safe pair of hands. But even he knows that they're completely fucked - the UK is in a fucking mess (and still is), and he can't solve it, because doing so would mean pissing off his own party, which after all the resignations and sackings, has all the power in the hands of the lunatics (which is why he had to put some of them in his cabinet).

Three of his eventual five pledges are completely unachievable without pissing off his own party, the fourth (halving inflation) is at the mercy of forces outside of his control. So the fifth has to be "stop the boats". Now there's no-one left in his party with the sensibilities to make this achievable (and, in fairness, it's a really fucking complicated problem that Labour will have a hard time solving), so this fucking ridiculous Rwanda proposal, this nonsensical gimmick, now becomes the fifth pledge.

It's also the only pledge that gives him the wiggle-room to make scapegoats for his own incompetence and lack of action (such as blaming the courts, human rights laws, etc.), which also has the potential to be an election winner. But dull Li'l Rishi is so fucking dull that rent-a-gobs like Suella Braverman need to fill the void, so she goes full-blown headbanger about it, which may have aroused praise from some, but it ended up alienating far more people than before.

So all Li'l Rishi has is this completely unworkable, ridiculous, gimmick policy - and because he's got nothing else to get on his soapbox about (other than, say, speed limits, ULEZ and laughing gas - all of which became chip-paper news stories very quickly). But even Suella knows that the policy is completely ridiculous and unworkable, which is why she jumped ship and is now pointing fingers from the sidelines (she can't very well admit it's unworkable if she wants to be the next Tory leader, can she?).

Li'l Rishi knows he and the Tories are fucked at the next election (as do most of the Tories, which is why they've started taking jobs as rent-a-gobs at newspapers and the likes of GB News), he's got fuck all support within his party, so now it's a case of trying to at least scrape some of the vote from the interminably thick that have fled to Reform UK, as well as causing a headache for Labour at the next election and in government (because you can bet that immigration will be something the Tories, as an opposition, will not fucking shut up about).

You can tell that he knows he's on borrowed time, and the lunatic wing of the Tories are working overtime to ensure it's a fellow lunatic that'll be made leader of the opposition, so they're not going to shut up about it and let him go with any grace or dignity. I think he'd quite like to resign and fuck off to the USA to live, but the Tories know a leadership-spill will essentially be announcing a general election - and with polls the way they are, they'd be decimated.

So it's a ridiculous gimmick that became serious policy, but has now become the Tories only means of survival at the election, but also as an opposition as the Tories will (at least, by the hopes of the lunatic wing) just become a load of finger-pointing Suellas denying their own responsibility for the mess they created.

The Tories are a fucking mess, and I think long-time Tory voters that are still going to vote Tory at the next election really need a bit more self-respect, because the Tories have just taken the absolute piss out of those that voted for them by being so entirely self-interested.

[Stooo]

What CdV said and far better and knowledgeable people than me need to follow the money. So far we've sent Rwanda around 1% of their GDP for nothing which begs the question: who is raking it in? Because someone linked to the present regime surely is.

The reciprocal exchange is unexplained and at best, vague. There are excuses rather than answers as to the amount of undesirables that Rwanda want to kick back to the UK in the terms of the treaty that remains cloaked.

The Tories got a hard-on for ULEZ after the South Ruislip by-election and after most people in London realised that their shitboxes were compliant it went away but the tories still think that populism and rage bait will win them the election rather than a massive cost of living crisis and everything being shit, this isn't redneck America and we see the way that you fold your flag.

[Cactus Jack]

I won't quote Cherie's post but I agreed with a lot of it.

Having worked in the gambling industry I watched a lot people go 'on tilt', chasing losses by throwing ridiculous amounts of money at bets that would never have fully recouped their losses but might have mitigated them, the problem was these bets were such longshots and the amount of money they had to stake was so much all it ever did was make things worse.

I think that's the situaton the Tories find themselves in now. Of course Rishi Sunak himself has nothing to lose, he has his green card and will be off to the Californian sunshine the day the last vote is counted.

[Stooo]

It passed

[Cactus Jack]

It passed

So we now have a law that says

All dogs are cats

'Cats' can't be called dogs by any UK court

But the Rwanda courts can say not only are all the dogs dogs but so are some of the cats

Good luck getting that through the Lords or a third reading Rishi.

[Cherry de Voured]

It passed

So we now have a law that says

All dogs are cats

'Cats' can't be called dogs by any UK court

But the Rwanda courts can say not only are all the dogs dogs but so are some of the cats

Good luck getting that through the Lords or a third reading Rishi.

James O'Brien?

[Cherry de Voured]

I'm hoping it's all doomed to fail, and this is just the desperate clutching-at-straws.

Being over here in Australia, I have no idea what the litmus test for public opinion is on the subject; I don't hold much hope for the UK at the moment, I don't know what the fuck has happened to it.

We had a "stop the boats" campaign way back in 2013 here in Australia; it helped win an utter dipshit an election, but he didn't see out the next one (although a month or so ago, said dipshit was giving media interviews in the UK about the importance of such a policy - fuck knows why they'd give airtime to a Prime Minister of Australia that went down as one of the worst!).

That's the exact problem here - an attempt at short-term gains that don't go anywhere, and ultimately cause a downfall. Mind you, we didn't have fixed terms back then - so even if this wins the Tories an election, I think it'll be another arduous cataclysm of leadership bids for the next five years.

I hope the British public are smart enough to see that; but if I'm being honest (and it pains me to say so as a born-and-bred Britisher), I don't know if they are. Every time I think the country couldn't sink any lower, it fucking surprises me.

[Text]

I don't get the Rwanda thing. Afaik the deal is that the Rwandans can send their own refugees whom they don't want ie their 'rejects' to the UK. So there would be no net reduction of UK migrants anyway.

I'm not trivialising things, I know that the subject of immigration is a massive headache for the govt .... (not because of how much it costs -believe it or not it's a drop in the ocean compared to everything else - but because of how the voting public perceives the issue financially & culturally).

[Cactus Jack]

I don't get the Rwanda thing. Afaik the deal is that the Rwandans can send their own refugees whom they don't want ie their 'rejects' to the UK. So there would be no net reduction of UK migrants anyway.

I'm not trivialising things, I know that the subject of immigration is a massive headache for the govt .... (not because of how much it costs -believe it or not it's a drop in the ocean compared to everything else - but because of how the voting public perceives the issue financially & culturally).

Essentially if you're a migrant wanting to get to the UK the most sure and secure route is to head for Rwanda and either commit a crime or bride an official to turn down your asylum claim. You will then be guaranteed a nice safe flight to the UK and having your asylum claim fast-tracked.

Because letting Rwanda's rejects unquestioned access to the UK is how we 'take back control'

[Stooo]

So if anyone is deported to Rwanda then they get a Rwandan ID and if they return to the UK they cannot be returned to Rwanda because it's not a safe country for them.

Someone didn't think this through...