16 April 2022
Boris Johnson broke the law. The Government are now trying to change the law so that asylum seekers are deemed to have done so too.
“Let us suppose you are losing an argument,” wrote a pundit in the Daily Telegraph in 2013. “The facts are overwhelmingly against you, and the more people focus on the reality the worse it is for you and your case”. His advice: “Your best bet in those circumstances is to performe a manoeuvre that a great campaigner describes as ‘throwing a dead cat on the table, mate’.” [The London Economic]
The idea is that everyone in the room will suddenly stop thinking about the weakness of your position and start talking about the dead cat on the table. The pundit? Boris Johnson, of course.
So it is likely he or his circle knew exactly what they were doing when, just after Johnson had received a fine for law breaking, they announced the plan to deport newly arrived migrants to Rwanda. Reliably, practically everyone remotely liberal, progressive or left-leaning has, quite rightly, condemned this outrageous, impractical, and expensive scheme.
The problem for Johnson is, if your table is already covered in feline corpses, throwing on another has a much reduced effect. The law of diminishing returns has kicked in. We are perfectly capable of simultaneously walking the walk of condemning the Government for their ostentatiously callous approach to those seeking asylum, while chewing the gum of reminding everyone that Johnson is a law-breaker.
So let us remind ourselves that Johnson is a law breaker – the first Prime Minister ever to be in that unenviable position. As the Prime Minsiter who brought back Priti Patel, who had earlier been forced to resign over off-the-books meeting with Israeli officials, he is also responsible for an exponential instensification of the ‘hostile environment’ for migrants.
That hostility has reached its apogee in this hare-brained Rwandan scheme – which comes just after the Government recently boasted of its ‘generosity’ towards Ukrainian refugees. Campaigners have pointed out the implicit potential racism in offering homes for Ukrainians (good as that is in itself) while signally failing to do so for, say, the Afghans who only a few months ago were the objects of UK Government ‘generosity’.
But that idea of ‘generosity’, aside from being apparently somewhat short lived, is incredibly selective – and that is where we get to the real heart of the matter.
Generosity is not the same as justice.
The Government have set up a few narrowly drawn refugee ‘Resettlement’ schemes – for Syrians, Afghans and now Ukrainians already accorded refugee status – which they then trumpet as ‘generous’ – while at the same time literally criminalising anyone who arrives seeking asylum (ie, asking to be accorded refugee status) outside the scope of those schemes.
Arrive by boat or lorry, and without all your papers in order, and under the Government’s plans, you will be held to have broken the law – that is, if the Nationality and Borders Bill is enacted.
Under the Bill, anyone arriving by one of the informal routes, like a cross-channel boat, will be defined as ‘illegal’. According to the new scheme, to add to this, men (only men, mind you) arriving by boat will be turned straight around and sent thousands of miles off to Rwanda. Why? Well, as Johnson explained, our compassion may be infinite “but our capacity is not”. Remarkable that Rwanda (GDP $10.5bn) appears to have more ‘capacity’ than the UK (GDP $2.7 TRILLION). To say nothing of the fact that Rwanda is already home to about 4 times more refugees per capita than the UK. But then of course, we are going to be using UK public money to buy this service, sell the migrants on to the lowest bidder, as it were, so perhaps capacity is not the issue.
Perhaps ‘compassion’ is not the issue either; perhaps this is a matter of injustice, cloaked by a redefinition of the very concept of asylum. The Nationalities and Borders Bill, after all, effectively says that your claim for asylum will not be judged on the basis of whether you have a well-founded fear of persecution (the UN definition), but on your method of travel.
And that really is criminal.
Maurice Macartney
16 April 2022
Community of Others 