Next Tuesday, Parliament will vote on the government’s proposal to fly unwanted migrants to Rwanda. That country is seen as a sensible replacement for the three-star British hotels in which many migrants are currently housed.
Now Rwanda’s record on human rights shouldn’t make many asylum seekers see the country as exactly the kind of asylum they seek. Even assuming Rwanda has changed since the events depicted in the film alluded to in the title above, the memory is too fresh to be just a memory.
Hence, I suspect the government’s idea is an iceberg. The visible part is the desire to remove the overflow of boat people as far from Britain as geography and geopolitics will allow. What lies underneath the surface though is the possible deterrent effect on future seekers of British pastures green.
If today’s lot end up in Hotel Rwanda, rather than a three-star hotel in the Home Counties, the next generation may think twice about risking their lives in those cross-Channel dinghies. Oh well, best-laid plans and all that, but I can’t for the life of me see this solution as the best one possible.
Everything I read on the subject (or watch on Sky News between my two breakfast croissants) regales me with a plethora of fine legal points that take me so far out of my depth that I suspect the real purpose is to obfuscate, not to elucidate.
The previous attempt to put migrants on Rwanda-bound planes was blocked by the Supreme Court, a body shoved down Britain’s throat by Tony Blair, which by itself means its remit is mostly subversion. On general principle, any superfluous institution is ipso facto subversive, violating as it does the 17th century principle that says: “If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”
The Supreme Court is superfluous because it at best duplicates and at worst usurps the judiciary function of the House of Lords. That House has managed to review British laws for centuries, but the problem with it, as seen by the Blair lot, was precisely that it was strictly British. That’s why our international socialists needed a bypass that could take them around parochial British interests. Enter the Supreme Court.
The principal function of this defective child of Tony Blair is to ensure compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Thus the Supreme Court was supposed to be one of the chains binding Britain to the EU, effectively turning her into a province of a giant, unaccountable superstate.
One would think that Brexit ought to have put paid to the Supreme Court. After all, the British people, voting in greater numbers than they had ever voted for anything else, communicated their desire to hang on to their, which is to say parliamentary, sovereignty.
The natural thing to do would have been to go back to how things used to be when it was Parliament that governed the country, not the European Commission and its various offshoots. Yet as we know, the idea of getting Brexit done has been steadily undermined by unreconstructed Remainers who want to get Brexit done in.
They hang on to the anachronistic survivals of the EU, such as ECHR and consequently the Supreme Court. That usurping body was thus able to stop those Rwanda planes from taking off.
Now the government has come up with a devilishly casuistic way of bypassing the bypass to make sure all those migrants can fly to Africa. I can’t judge the legal nuances of the proposed legislation, but Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick evidently could.
That’s why he resigned in disgust, correctly stating, albeit in the jargon of political equivocation, that no satisfactory solution to the problem can be found for as long as Britain stays in ECHR. Though he didn’t write that, Britain has nothing to learn about human rights from any European body, considering that we’ve had documents codifying basic liberties for almost a millennium – and an exemplary record for centuries.
By contrast, one dominant member of the EU, France, has had 17 different constitutions since 1789 and long periods of a rather spotty record on human rights. As to the other dominant member, Germany, the less said about her the better.
Mr Jenrick obviously regards ECHR as the millstone pulling Britain down to the bottom of the EU swamp. A truly satisfactory solution to the migrants’ problem is impossible for as long as Britain has that weight around her neck.
No country is truly sovereign if it can’t control who is allowed to cross its borders, and in what kind of numbers. That realisation should be the starting point of any thinking on the subject.
The next logical step would be to introduce effective border controls guaranteed to work. In common with any practical measure, this one must start with clear thinking unsullied by extraneous concerns.
Legal asylum applications must be processed quickly and decisively. A certain number of people who can legitimately show that their lives would be in danger if they stayed in their native lands can be admitted.
Even that number has to be limited on purely arithmetic grounds: people who can make such a claim credible must number in at least tens of millions around the world. I doubt even Tony Blair would hospitably invite as many.
Yet HMG has been way too generous in its definition of legitimate asylum seekers. Thus 55 per cent of the Albanians who have requested that status got it – and Albania is about to join the EU. Not a single Albanian is in real need of asylum, although I’m sure many are in need of a higher standard of living.
As to the illegal migrants, the key to their treatment should come from the adjective, not the noun. ‘Illegal’ means they break the law, which makes them criminals, to be dealt with as such. One likes to think Britain hasn’t completely lost her wherewithal to combat criminality, although anyone walking through some areas of London may be forgiven for getting that impression.
We do still have the Royal Navy that has successfully defended Britain’s coastline from enemy fleets sent out by Philip II, Napoleon and Hitler. I realise we are no longer the naval power we used to be, but surely we still have the capacity of stopping a few dozen unarmed dinghies.
If we haven’t, the problem isn’t physical but metaphysical: the paralysis of will. If that’s the case, a few airliners here or there carrying several hundred illegals to Africa won’t offer even a viable solution.
That’s what the much-despised conservative wing of the Conservative Party are saying. They correctly prophesy that the government’s namby-pamby dithering on immigration could wipe the party out as a parliamentary force. Such right-minded Tories are likely to switch over to the Reform Party, heir to UKIP, thereby hastening the arrival of the doom they predict.
That will guarantee a Labour domination for a generation at least, with catastrophic consequences for the country. A meaningful step towards preventing that disaster would be giving the British people what they demanded in 2016: the reclaiming of parliamentary sovereignty.
That includes regaining control of the national borders – real control, that is. Not the fly-by-night palliatives amounting to little more than smoke and mirrors.
I thought the ECHR was a creation of the Council of Europe, and not the EU? Could be wrong though, wouldn’t be the first time.
You aren’t wrong, but that’s a distinction without a difference. All those pan-European institutions come from the same source, which is why I lump them together.
The worst part of this asylum seeker mess [from my perspective in the USA also] is that these seekers pass through a multiple number of countries prior to arriving in England. If indeed they are seeking asylum and have a justifiable reason for doing so, they are supposed to by the rules of asylum apply at the first country they arrive in.
Consider that the seekers USA often pass through three or four countries prior to arriving at the USA border. These migrants from west Africa for instance have been known to first fly to Turkey, then to Columbia, etc. That stuff is not cheap. Where do all those people get the money to do so to begin with?
Has the proposal any chance of passing?
Here in the States we have recently discovered that pro-illegal-immigration politicians quickly change their minds when the problem is brought to their doorstep. Might I suggest housing a few thousand of these migrants inside and on the steps of the Palace of Westminster?
I have never heard a strong argument in favor of mass immigration. Most often we hear, “They take jobs Americans don’t want.” Americans don’t want jobs because they can live for free off their fellow citizens – even non-citizens can do that. Many of our modern issues are intertwined. Raise children to believe that a day’s hard work (at whatever job) is honorable and required for a life well led, get people off the dole, and we’ll have more than enough people to perform those jobs that they don’t want (but need).
In the recent case of West Lindsey District Council and others v His Majesty’s Government, the judge accepted HMG’s argument that there weren’t enough hotels to accommodate the fanatical invading troops – er, I mean the innocent refugees from oppression – and that therefore RAF Scampton and similar sites must be used in order to protect the lovable new arrivals from destitution. If you thought that only an idiot would be fooled by such an argument, you’d be right, because our senior judges are idiots at best, extreme leftists at worst.
But Mrs Justice Thornton is a judge in the High Court, and neither a Brexit-inspired withdrawal from the ECHR nor the abolition of Blair’s pernicious Supreme Court would remove her and many idiots and/or leftists like her from power. It isn’t only foreign institutions and new institutions that we have to worry about: our ancient traditional institutions have also been taken over by idiots and leftists to such an extent that it’s hard to see how to restore them to what they used to be and ought to be.