This week in Brexitland, December 14, 2023

How the Rwanda plan proves that Brexit has been a failure

Nothing sums up the whole Rwanda fiasco quite like Robert Jenrick resigning from his job as Immigration Secretary over Sunak’s Bill to move forward with the plan, only to then not even vote against the bill anyhow. Yet it fits in perfectly with the mood around the whole thing, which reminds everyone of when Mrs May was trying to get her Withdrawal Agreement through parliament in 2019, and her own party tearing itself to pieces as a result.

The sense of deja vu is striking: a group of right-wing Tory MPs are trying to hold the government hostage because they want the leader of their party to change reality itself, and as it happens, the government does not have the ability to change reality. In the end, what falls is the government in a situation like this. That’s the nature of cold hard, material reality - facts don’t care about your feelings.

Rwanda is, in so many ways, proof of Brexit’s total failure. To put it another way, if Brexit had worked out even half as well as the Leavers told us it would, there is no way we’d have a Conservative government talking about something this daft. And oh boy, is the Rwanda plan daft.

The agreement is that Rwanda will take about 200 refugees a year. That’s it. To put that into perspective, the backlog in refugee cases in the UK stands at over 100,000. So, even if the Rwanda plan worked to its fullest extent, it would remove 0.2% of the current refugees seeking asylum in the United Kingdom every year - and that’s with the scheme working to its maximum potential. And for this, the government has paid several hundred million pounds already and will no doubt pay millions more of taxpayer money for the same paltry result.

The only retort supporters of the Rwanda plan have to this is, “It will act as a deterrent to people coming to Britain seeking asylum”. But there is absolutely no way it will. If you were someone determined enough to cross continents and then the English Channel in a dinghy, would a 0.2% chance of being sent to east Africa really put you off the whole enterprise? Your chances of drowning in the Channel are probably statistically higher than that.

Why is Sunak’s government pursuing this with such vigour then, if it’s that obviously daft? In short, Brexit logic. This is when you put something in the centre of your political universe and make everything else revolve around that, no matter what. When it was Brexit, nothing could deter pro-Brexit Conservative MPs from making arguments that while making a positive case for Brexit, trashed all of their other values. The greatest example of this being arch-Thatcherite John Redwood moaning about “EU austerity” like an old Corbynite.

They’ve made Rwanda everything, even though putting it there makes everything ridiculous. Just as Brexit was never going to solve our problems, Rwanda won’t solve anything either. Like Brexit, it is a placeholder for our lack of actual ideas as a society. Like Brexit, it demonstrates the degeneracy of the political class in Britain, the opting for silly schemes like Rwanda as a means of trying to fool the electoral at least one more time before everything comes crashing down.

There is another way in which Rwanda demonstrates how Brexit has failed that is more profound. When we were in the EU, we had an agreement with other member states on refugees and where they ended up. That was sacrificed for Brexit. The great irony here being, a large chunk of the vote for Brexit was based around people wanting to stop immigration, yet Brexit itself has resulted in increased immigration and indeed, increased illegal immigration, as many predicted back in 2016.

That’s both why they need Rwanda and won’t be able to agree on a way to take Rwanda forward since, like Brexit, it’s something that was never meant to actually happen in real life. It can only exist as a fantasy, so it is important for those who most value it to make sure it never happens, or if it does, to complain about how it was compromised in some way by bad actors. That’s what we’re seeing now - the Tory rebels aren’t doing what they are doing because they are anti-Rwanda plan - in fact, the ones disrupting the process are its most vocal supporters - but because they want a fictional “hard Rwanda” and don’t want to see anything less than their fantasy version of the whole thing play out. Just as they sabotaged May’s Brexit (and would have done so to Boris Johnson’s Brexit, had he not run out the clock on them), they are destroying the Rwanda plan to save the Rwanda plan. No, it doesn’t make practical sense, but it does make sense on an emotional level. And these days, during this country’s Brexit era, that’s what politics is all about.

Thanks for reading. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do so, and I’ll be back next week with the worst of Brexit.