ECONOMIC DISASTER: Sunak's Rwanda plan will cost us SO MUCH MORE YET!

Right, so the House of Lords as they so frequently seem to do, have finally backed down over Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda Bill and it has passed. Perhaps after seeing nearly a quarter of a billion pounds spaffed on this scheme so far, with Sunak seemingly intent on spending whatever it takes to see this happen, they figured a return was needed? Perhaps they were just sick and tired of debating this as the night drew on, late night votes a tactic to force the hand of tired peers, though given how often we see peers sleeping on the job anyway, I’m not sure why this is so off-putting to some of them, but in all seriousness as invariably happens, the peers decide to ‘acknowledge the primacy of the House’, which is to say they throw in the towel and let the Commons get its way. This is supposed to be Sunak’s big deterrent to those crossing in small boats, but it won’t be, it is doomed to fail and more people will die trying to cross, 5 more fatalities in the Channel happening as this law was being debated in the Lords, just to prove it. This plan is doomed to fail, it cannot possibly work for all manner of reasons and when it fails, things will get consistently worse for the Tories electoral chances.
Right, so the Rwanda Bill has passed the Lord’s stage, it’ll now go on to get royal assent and pass into law. Sunak is positively bouncing with glee as people, the likes of his own parents, who come here as migrants, people who come here to seek asylum, now faced deportation to Rwanda. Or do they really, because you can pass all manner of crackpot s**thousery into law, just because it becomes law does not mean it is good or right, or even workable and when it inevitably blows up in the Tories faces yet again, the blame game will start again, Starmer can smile to himself as the votes roll in for him in response, despite doing and standing for absolutely nothing, or absolutely nothing different, because the Tories become seen yet again, as stupefyingly incompetent. The Rwanda scheme is a ball and chain around their necks, yet they can’t resist wearing it. It’s punching themselves in the face and calling it winning votes.
So it’s law now then. Great, when will the first flights take off then? Well Sunak is gurning all over right now, saying July, no ifs or buts, however there is one very big but here, a great big fat elephant in the room, which is who is going to fly these people to Rwanda then? Which airline is prepared to do so, because they weren’t exactly queueing up at the door of Number 10 to accept contracts for this job before?
Well one body advising airlines to give this work a wide berth is the UN, who have issued a warning to airlines not to take up these flights, not to accept the work, because if they do, they could be held responsible for violations of international humanitarian law. Both airlines and their regulators could end up being found guilty of complicity in any human rights violations as a result of people being sent to Rwanda, but I’ll come back to the legalities of this in a moment.
If major airlines are not likely to want to risk being grounded over accusations of human rights violations, accusations and charges even of human trafficking would not be good for business, then who would be?
Well, it seems Sunak has possibly thought of that already and again proving that money is no object, because Sunak is apparently going to charter private flights, an airfield and commercial charter planes are already booked for specific flights. Well how much is that costing then? Well we don’t know the charter company, we don’t know the deal the government might have done with them, but we do know it is a damn sight more expensive than a standard commercial flight.
I went onto a flight booking site, I used Kayak, and an economy flight on RwandAir, from Heathrow to Kigali, costs £591 if I planned on leaving on the 6th May. Last month, James Cleverly, our misnamed Home Secretary went to Rwanda to sign a new treaty over these deportations and took a private chartered flight, which apparently cost £165,000. Amazing that the Tories can find money for whatever they want whilst letting public services fall into ruin isn’t it? Now I can’t say the disparity will be as great as that, though I do find it entertaining that Rwanda literally have their own flagship airline and they evidently won’t let them be used for these flights either!
Whatever the final price tag is though, it will be dearer than ordinary flights the likes of us would take.
But of course this all predicates upon these flights getting off the ground. They were stopped before, they will almost certainly be stopped again. Legislating that Rwanda is a safe country is stupid, when under international law it isn’t and under a ruling from our own Supreme Court, it isn’t either. Making laws to circumvent the Supreme Court ruling is one thing, but going to the European Court of Human Rights will ground those flights. It isn’t a foreign court as Sunak keeps inferring, it is an international court. Of course we have the spectre of Sunak threatening to take us out of the EHRC if they choose to stop these flights, which they will and they’ll clog the system up by taking on cases on an individual basis amongst those chosen to be deported.
Let’s not forget that for all of Sunak’s posturing about taking us out of the EHRC, it wouldn’t actually matter, because assuming the migrants are coming from a UN member state, they’ll be entitled to EHRC representation versus our own system at that point, having joined the likes of Russia and Belarus as international pariah states. That’s a heck of a step down the road, I appreciate, the bigger question I have given none of us elected Sunak to run the country is who does he think he is even suggesting this, but that’s the extent he says he’d take us to if needs be to get those flights of the ground, all of our human rights having gone in the bin to get to that point as well.
Anyway, getting ahead of ourselves a bit there. Suffice to say, legal challenges will again cripple matters, almost certainly past the point of a General Election Sunak is hell bent on losing and as this fails, he’ll lose even more heavily, to no sympathy from anyone.
Keep adding up the costs by this point too of course, because as I said at the start, we’re already nearly quarter of a billion pounds into this with Rwanda with not a single migrant deported.
As for how many migrants will be deported? Well the Home Office are currently only preparing a list for the first flight that probably won’t take off anyway, so all this gumpf, all this Sunak posturing and they haven’t even got the list yet, but the first list of 200 migrants is currently being drawn up. Yes all of 200 migrants and that is as many as we will be sending to Rwanda each year. That works out as 0.7% of all migrants who came to Britain and claimed asylum in the whole of 2023, let alone all of those from before still stuck in an asylum backlog, some 128,000 people as I understand it at this moment in time, that’s according to a BBC piece from the end of last month and just 200 of them can expect to be put on a flight to Rwanda, so asylum seekers have a 1 in 640 chance of being sent Rwanda anyway and if we take the cost as it already stands at what we’ve spent on this ridiculous Rwanda scheme already, those first 200 asylum seekers, will have cost us £1.2m a piece to send there. Do you really think that’s cheaper than just housing them here? Each migrant could on that basis have paid for half a dozen houses to be built, paid the annual salary of 40 teachers or nurses. The waste is incredible and doesn’t even put a dent in the asylum backlog. The chances of anyone being sent there are next to nil and so it shouldn’t be a surprise that this isn’t putting asylum seekers off. Fundamentally, this is where the policy failure is its most damning, because the boats will still come and nothing underlines the failure this policy will be, then the reported deaths of 5 more people trying to cross the channel as the Lords were debating and finally relenting on this policy last night. The I reported that:
‘At least five migrants are reported to have died off the coast of France.
A police operation is under way on Tuesday morning after an attempt to cross the Channel.
French newspaper La Voix Du Nord has reported at least five migrants have died.
It is reported that the French coast guard said there was a failed attempt to cross the Channel and police were at a beach after the incident.’
They will still come. There’s next to no chance that they’ll be sent to Rwanda, they may be stuck in the system for a long time, but that is down to Tory failure to invest in public services, in this case asylum processing. The money they’ve blown on this Rwanda vanity project to appeal to racists and bigots frankly, would have been better used here.
Rather than send these people to Rwanda and risk legal cases, delays all costing vastly more, the figures of used as I said are based on things as they stand now, they will get far worse as the Tories will throw more money at this and likely get nowhere.
A sane government would have gone down the road of a new returns policy with the EU, so that we take our fair share of migrants. If you are worried about where to house them, ask the government why they’ve failed to build housing sufficient to meet their obligations not only to asylum but to all of us struggling with housing here. The failure is the governments, so do not blame the migrants. If the government wanted to save lives and stop people drowning in the Channel, they could create a legal asylum route, but they won’t and we haven’t one since Blair got rid of the last one we had. Simple legislative moves to save lives and invest in the system to process these claims. Instead the Tories had to turn it into a culture war costing us an arm and a leg in a desperate last bid to save their electoral chances and doesn’t it prove how detached from reality they all are, but especially that worm Sunak, that this is what he thinks appeals to us to vote for him. It’s no wonder the party faces extinction does it?
Meanwhile another problem with the Rwanda scheme that positively shattered Suella Braverman’s deportation dreams is the fact that all that lovely housing she implied we were paying for to house them, the housing she visited, has been sold off to local Rwandans because we weren’t paying for it at all, it was affordable housing being half paid for by the Rwandan state, surely they didn’t lie to us? Find out all about that little nugget on this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.