Batshit

One of the achievements of the current Conservative government in the UK is to normalise discussion of its so-called “flagship” policy of sending asylum-seekers to Rwanda. Most of the discussion of this “batshit” policy (the word is the one apparently used by the Home Secretary James Cleverly, of what is now his own policy) is now around its legality or otherwise, rather than its profound moral disgracefulness: after it was found to be illegal by the Supreme Court – the highest court in the land – on the grounds that Rwanda was not a safe country, for a multitude of reasons, the government is now introducing its Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill, which will apparently determine that Rwanda is a safe country after all. As Mark Elliott, professor of public law at Cambridge, has written, the Rwanda bill is an attempt to “reverse by law a finding of fact by the Supreme Court”. How Orwellian, to use an overworked term, is that? Apart from the legal niceties, if that is the word, one can rely on certain BBC correspondents and others to discuss the policy in terms of the Westminster game of “who’s in, who’s out”, tracing its curious ancestry from conception in the womb of Priti Patel through whole-hearted (again not quite the word) adoption by the appalling Suella Braverman to guardianship under her new clone, the execrable and ineffably slimy Robert Jenrick, a man Charles Dickens would have had fun with.

I am not a lawyer, so my surprise that a bill that directly contradicts the judgement of the highest court in the land, and in effect declares that white is black, can be legal is probably just naive. But the real point is that the Rwanda policy is an utter shameful disgrace. Forcibly deporting people who are escaping from danger and persecution (I’m assuming that most of the people crossing the Channel on small boats have valid asylum claims, as seems reasonable) to a country at the opposite end of the earth where they have no connections and where asylum claims are routinely subject to government interference, as Philip Collins comments in today’s Times, and where there is effectively no route to appeal, is almost the definition of cruelty and immorality. Its cruelty and immorality are, of course, in one sense precisely its point. How could it act as a deterrent otherwise? If something is worse than the danger of crossing the Channel at dead of night in midwinter in a small inflatable dinghy, it must be pretty bad, pretty unsafe. But no, Rwanda is a safe country. And Brutus is an honourable man.

It seems strange that Rishi Sunak has chosen to fight a last-ditch battle on this fetid and treacherous ground. Apart from anything else, the scheme seems to be a monumental waste of money, a scheme, to quote Collins again, for transferring money (£260 million so far, with not a single person deported) rather than people to Rwanda. But that’s where we are now, in a country which went batshit crazy on 23 June 2016 and is showing no signs of emerging from its psychosis.