No 30 Refugees to Rwanda
How odd it was that the Prime Minister’s ethics advisor chose to resign, but not the PM himself, over the horrible, cruel and probably illegal treatment of people fleeing as refugees or to join family members in Britain. No, this was not what bothered the noble lord, Lord Geidt – a genuine pillar of the top drawer of the Establishment, a former advisor to Her Maj.
What beats many is why anyone would want to take on that job in the first place. From the start, Johnson has never been on the right side of ethics. When he got elected as MP for Uxbridge, he promised his constituency he would fight tooth and nail to prevent the unwanted expansion of Heathrow Airport. He lied, and later broke that promise.
As Mayor of London, he promoted extravagant notions like the Garden Bridge: that cost a small fortune in consultants’ fees, and never got started. Another of his projects was to be an island airport in the Thames estuary – again, a hugely expensive never-wozzer. His solution to policing street protests was to import second-hand some water-cannon – only to find it was illegal to use them in Britain. Londoners were left to foot the bills for Boris’s legacy.
In his chaotic private life, he went his merry way, a classic two-timer. And when he achieved his lifetime’s ambition and arrived in Downing Street, with his ‘girl-friend’ in tow, he was still negotiating his way through a divorce. Plus, so many stories of previous extra-marital affairs, and goodness knows how many children.
As Prime Minister, his policies keep coming up against international laws. Having negotiated and signed a treaty, the Northern Ireland Protocol, designed to keep goods flowing in spite of Brexit, it was not long before he decided unilaterally to scrap it. Regardless of the consequences!
Likewise with the awkward problem of refugees arriving on the beaches of Kent. Egged on by the more xenophobic Brexiteer MPs, UKIP, and other far-right fringe movements, and backed by the Home Office with its historic dislike of immigration, this new scheme was dreamed up.
Home Secretary Priti Patel had done her homework on this some years before. On holiday in Israel, she had had talks with Israeli politicians, and was sacked as a Minister by the then Prime Minister. (It is not the done thing to operate your own foreign policy, and not getting permission to do this was a sacking offence.)
It turns out that Israel had pioneered the Rwanda scheme, resettling refugees in Rwanda. Later, it seems, this was not such a brilliant idea. The wretched refugees found Rwanda was not their idea of a future life. Many fled the country, often assisted by people traffickers – for a price. Where exactly they ended up who knows.
If that is the model for the Johnson-Patel policy, it looks doomed to fail. Lawyers galore and court hearings put paid to the first flight. While the UK’s Supreme Court has not yet ruled on its legality, the European Court of Human Rights ruled against the scheme. So now, Boris Johnson and his allies have been talking about withdrawing Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights.
That Convention was created by Churchill in the post-war years, and the British government was an early signatory. Among the rights it protects are the right of freedom of expression, and of freedom to protest, etc. Many of these were already part of British common law, some of them dating from the Magna Carta.
In Patel’s view, the peaceful and legal protests against her policy amount to “mob-rule” and so the right to protest or to demonstrate should be got rid of. That opinion would be shared by Putin, Xi and Kim, and a large number of authoritarian rulers.
Legality aside, what of the ethics of such a scheme? To start with, we live in a world where the UN report that there are now over 100 million refugees.
Some of these have fled dictatorships, where critics of the regime can face torture or horrendous jail sentences, or be ‘disappeared’. Many are uprooted due to the environmental – climate change – problems of trying to eek out a living on land which is regularly flooded or drought-stricken. Or there may be religious or cultural persecution, or even a genocidal regime.
The existence of refugees is actually, like wars and poverty, a by-product of the capitalist system, and is especially a feature of nation-states with a dominant and intolerant religious culture. In the modern world, so many people are up-rooted and forced to flee their homes and homelands due to extreme poverty, or corrupt and ruthless dictatorships.
Patel’s Rwanda scheme was something which shocked many even of the Tory government’s supporters. So very “un-British”, some said. In the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, many politicians have proudly spoken of “Britain’s proud tradition” of welcoming refugees. It gave them a warm feeling, one supposes – as if they too were actually human.
But that “proud tradition” stuff is a myth. Pre-1914, Jewish and other European refugees were at best only tolerated, at worst victims of violence and prejudice. In the 1930s Jews and others fleeing Fascism found the British government denying them asylum. Many who arrived as refugees were then sent to Canada and Australia, even though in wartime, such ships were prey to lethal submarine attack. Other European refugees, including small children, found themselves interned in the Isle of Man, regarded as suspect.
Many have noted the difference in the way Ukrainian refugees have been actively encouraged to make their way to Britain for asylum. Contrast that with the cold-shoulder treatment and bureaucratic delays which prevented so many Afghans getting the promised asylum they so badly needed as the Taliban hunted them down for revenge. Such differences in policy are clearly indicative of systemic government racism.
The problem of how a state should deal with refugees is actually an ancient one, long pre-dating capitalism. It was recorded in Greek writings of the 5th century BCE when Athens as a city-state with an advanced culture was proud of its ‘open-door’ policy.
In some of his plays, Euripides (c.484-406 BCE) argued for this principle, maintaining it was shameful to turn away those who needed and sought help. In The CHILDREN OF HERACLES, written soon after the start of the long war with Sparta, Euripides wrote in the strongest language possible about this important principle: “It is an offense against the gods to turn away suppliants (l. 108).”
“I want also to tell you that, as ruler of this land, you have no choice but to protect these boys (l. 204) … these boys ask this of you: do not give them up, or deny them the sanctuary of Athens, mocking your own country’s gods by letting others drag them away! (l. 220). This act would bring disgrace on you, disgrace, too, on your city (l. 224) … Where is the justice in leading off suppliants against their will? (l. 255).”
EURIPIDES - MEDDEA AND OTHER PLAYS, tr. John Davie, 1996, Penguin Classics
These views are now echoed in the shocked and disgusted reactions to the Patel-Johnson policy of criminalising and deporting each and every person who arrives in Britain without government approval.
Earlier governments – of both persuasions, Tory or so-called Labour – have, over many decades, enacted and enforced ever more stringent barriers to normal ways of travel.
First, the paperwork – which led to the Windrush scandal. Next, the airlines were fined heavily if a refugee travelled by air. Then, it was the lorry-drivers who were assumed to have known and connived at bringing in these unofficial passengers, so were fined heavily.
The unfortunate refugees and immigrants – all now referred to as ‘migrants’ – ended up stranded near Calais, sleeping rough near the beaches, in improvised camps, in what tabloid journalists called ‘The Jungle’. As the years went by, these desperate people found helpers – first genuine do-gooders, but later a racket, with people-smugglers whose interest in them was simply mercenary. Effectively, this policy had created a black market.
Similarly, when the US government banned alcohol, in the Prohibition years, Mafia gangs turned bootlegging into a business, together with vicious protection rackets, illegal gambling, etc.
The Channel crossings of small boats, each with its cargo of helpless human flotsam, preyed on by these organised gangs, are in fact a direct result of successive government policies.
Indeed, many of them have been uprooted from their homes as a result of British wars and the messy unstable legacy of the British empire. Also, by the grinding hopeless poverty increased by the EU’s protectionist policies.
Banning all other means of travel to Britain (while requiring refugees to apply for asylum only in Britain), was guaranteed to create a black market, a racket.
The solution is not to create more barriers – physical or bureaucratic – but to recognise that human beings are people, not parcels. It is certainly not state-sponsored people-smuggling. That would be about as effective as opening up state brothels in an attempt to end prostitution.
To Socialists, the whole idea of erecting walls or fences, ruthlessly preventing humans from moving about from one part of this planet to another (unless very, very rich) is a form of political madness. By contrast, Socialists work for a ‘one world’ society. World Socialism is the only way to put an end to these never-ending wars, an end to tyranny and corrupt kleptocracies, as well as meaning an end to the class system with its poverty and profit-seeking.
The unethical, squalid and grubby profiteering of these politicians as they and their cronies took advantage of the Covid pandemic, and the shortage of essential PPE for hospital staff and other ’front-line’ workers, simply could not happen.
In Socialism the basic principle would be “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” A ‘one-world’ society, a worldwide community, a genuine commonwealth, would mean the fulfilment of Burns’s egalitarian vision:
For a’ that, and a’ that,
It’s comin yet for a’ that,
That man to man the warld o’er
Shall brithers be for a’ that.