No. 242 – ‘The Rwanda Plan’: A Woeful Attempt to Distract from Boris’s Woes.

Dear James,

In June 1940, Adolph Eichmann, acting under the orders of Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Holocaust, called for the resettlement of millions of Jews to an island off the coast of Africa. It was called the Madagascar Plan. The Jews were the unwanted population of Germany and Madagascar was then under the Vichy French. The plan collapsed because the Royal Navy would have intervened. The Holocaust ensued. 

Last Thursday, Priti Patel, our Home Secretary, signed the UK’s very own Rwanda Plan to rid itself of its own ‘unwanted population.’ Of course, they are very different situations. The Jews were subject to a vicious ant-semitic ideology whereas today’s asylum seekers are merely an irritating thorn in the side of the right wing of your Tory Party, James. Nevertheless, the simplistic methodologies are the same. Both plans envisaged transporting thousands of unwanted human beings, at great expense, to small African nations where they would be conveniently forgotten. Boris Johnson claims that it is a humanitarian way to break the ‘model of the people traffickers’ but this is just his usual hypocrisy! Operation Rwanda is a distraction from his own woes and its main target is to curry favour with his rabid right wing who want nothing more than to remove these unfortunate people from our shores and cast them into oblivion.  

The response has been deafening. ‘Impractical immoral and incredibly expensive,” cried Andrew Mitchell, once Tory Chief Whip.  The Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi called the scheme inhumane and cynical. “This proposal of offshoring asylum seekers to Rwanda is ineffective and costly,” she said. “It’s also inhumane and shames our proud history as advocates of human rights and the refugee convention. The UN Refugee Agency said that it flouted ‘international law’.  Today the Archbishop of Canterbury announced from his pulpit that ‘it is the opposite of the nature of God’’ and that this is ‘not a time to subcontract our responsibilities’.

This is not to say that international migration is not one of the most challenging problems of our time. Migrants fleeing famine, political persecution, economic mismanagement and the impacts of global climate change are growing in numbers each year. To chance their lives with people traffickers to get to places of political calm and prosperity only makes sense to many and, compared with the dead hands of autocracies such as Russia or China, they prefer Europe, the USA or the UK by far. Freedom and relative prosperity under laws generated by representatives, legitimately chosen in free elections, are guaranteed. But as autocracies flourish around the world and climate change continues to devastate large areas of the planet, the migrant crisis will only increase. How does the free world handle such a migrant explosion?

Well, one way not to do it is to export the problem to weaker nations especially nations with a poor records on human rights. Israel did a deal with Rwanda and found that four thousand of its ‘exported immigrants’ fell into the hands of people traffickers. This must not happen again. Britain must bear its responsibility for these people as required in international law when such people arrive at our borders.  To do this it must work with Europe, the UN and other international bodies to find better and legal ways of managing this crisis in world affairs. It is a problem that must be shared to provide migrants with safe and legal ways into the different host nations. It is not a problem that can be solved by instant, crowd pleasing policies such as the ‘Rwanda Plan’.

The Rwanda Plan James, is the latest iteration of ‘Operation Red Meat’, designed by Lynton Crosby and co, to pander to the grubby right wing of the Tory party. Such crude and simplistic, solutions to complex problems demanding serious and cooperative solutions are anathema to a majority of the British public who are appalled by this latest stain on our national character. We expect better than this James.

Five decades ago our then Prime Minster, Sir Edward Heath, opened the nation’s hearts and hospitality to two million Ugandans being persecuted by the tyrant, Idi Amin. One of the great beneficiaries of this largesse was a child called Priti Patel. Today it is she who is now instigating exactly the opposite policy on a later generation of asylum seekers. Shame on you Mrs Patel. And shame on you and Boris Johnson, James, for allowing it to happen!

BH – Your Concerned Constituent

To read all 234 ‘Dear James…' letters please go to dearjames.uk.