They lie as easily as they breathe. They cannot govern. They cannot even bring themselves to pretend to govern. So instead they inundate us with disinformation, which is then repeated by credulous journalists. That’s what last night’s Rwanda news was: a fiction, specifically designed to deceive the public. A last pathetic effort from a doomed administration to improve their chances before the local elections.
For the casual onlooker, it would have seemed as if the Government had finally got its Rwanda programme off the ground. “First ever migrant sent to Rwanda in historic move that will help stop the boats and remove thousands more,” The Sun‘s headline stated. Inside, there was an analysis, if you can call it that, by the paper’s political editor. It proudly informed readers that it was a moment with “huge and significant repercussions for the legality and the operational success of the Rwanda scheme”. The Prime Minister had shown that “it can be done in theory and in principle”.
The trouble is the analysis is false: conclusively so. This sort of journalism attempts to protect the powerful rather than challenge them. Other right-wing outlets, including The Telegraph and The Spectator, to their credit, had the good sense to recognise the truth of what was happening. The Sun did not.
In actual fact, yesterday’s flight had no connection with the Rwanda scheme whatsoever, except that it happened to have the same destination. It was a voluntary flight, under a plan unveiled last month, for a single failed asylum seeker, who was paid £3,000 to take the offer. The Rwanda scheme that we’ve been talking about for the last two years is an involuntary programme. It does not apply to failed asylum seekers or even successful ones, but to anyone who arrives in the UK via an unauthorised route. It would send them to Rwanda by force before their claim is processed.
As it happens, Sunak probably can get flights off to Rwanda before the election, but he has not done so here. Instead he has attempted to present a distinct scheme as vindication of his main scheme and – given the timing is so convenient – presumably tabled it for a moment when it would do him the most good. He has then relied on journalists to write it up in a favourable way. They might as well have handed him the pen and allowed him to write it himself.
Sunak is almost as bad at politics as he is at morality. Who exactly is this scheme supposed to appeal to? Obviously, not liberals or progressives, who consider Rwanda an ethical travesty and an abdication of national responsibility. But nor would it appeal to conservatives with animosity towards refugees. How is paying failed asylum seekers – not even successful ones – thousands in taxpayer money, then funding their flight and accommodation, supposed to please this group of voters? How exactly is it meant to appeal to them? Who on earth is it for?
Nor does the voluntary payment make the slightest bit of sense on the point of basic logic. Ministers have spent the last few months insisting that Rwanda is necessary because it is a deterrent. This is their core argument. It will deter people from coming on small boats. Their new argument, as of today, is that Britain is going to publicly pay asylum seekers thousands of pounds to go and live there even if their application fails and then actively promote that fact so it gets as much coverage as possible.
Earlier this week, the Prime Minister was insisting that Rwanda was already having an effect, because media coverage of the scheme was discouraging migrants from trying to get to the UK. It therefore follows that they will read the media coverage he has created today, which would undermine his deterrence policy.
None of it makes sense. It does not even make sense on its own terms. The logic of Monday is incompatible with the logic deployed on Wednesday. How many people can possibly be so bovine and inadequate that they would be convinced by the case the Government is making? It takes us all for fools. And in this, at least, Sunak is evenhanded. He treats reactionary voters as disrespectfully as he treats progressives.
There is a terrible void at the heart of what happened here. There is a specific form of ethical grotesquery in the sight of a government using a human being – any human being, even if they’re getting a cash payment – and their life for a cheap political stunt ahead of local elections, throwing it down on the table as if it were a gambling chip during a poker table.
But in fact the moral implications go further than that, further than just this one man and the scenario he is faced with. It lies in the distinction between this voluntary policy and the involuntary one. The people who are removed on flights if the original scheme becomes operational will not be failed asylum seekers, like the individual last night. They will mostly be genuine refugees. How do we know that? Because most people who apply for asylum in the UK are successful.
In 2022, just 24 per cent of asylum applications were refused at the initial decision-making stage. Many of those refusals are then subsequently overturned on appeal. Between 2004 to 2021, 30 per cent of appeals were allowed.
This is the secret the Government does not like to talk about. It’s not hard to see why people’s claims are so often successful. Nearly half of the asylum seekers in British hotels waiting for their case to be heard are from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran, Sudan and Syria. These are countries with exceptionally high pass rates – 99 per cent for Eritrea, 98 per cent for Afghanistan. Because those countries are war zones, where people are fleeing death, destruction and persecution.
They are the ones who will be punished by this scheme. Not failed asylum seekers. People who needed our help and will be traumatised instead. For all the nonsense on show today, all the cynicism and media games, that is the moral reality lurking underneath the Prime Minister’s grubby charade.