Rwanda: Nothing makes sense
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
We're through the looking glass now. We've passed into the upside-down world, the Bizarro planet, where everything means the opposite of what it implies and words can only be comprehended by their reversal. We're in the land where reason and meaning go to die.
We all knew we would come here eventually. Somewhere deep in the tributaries of our heart we knew we were destined for this terrible place. From that first morning after Brexit, it was clear that something had broken in our national dispensation. Our commitment to logic, which we had complacently assumed to be a fundamental part of our character, had been evaluated, found wanting, and cast aside.
But nothing could have prepared us for how mad we would eventually become, for the complete rejection of anything even approaching basic political sanity.
Rwanda is the key event. It's the point we went from an irrational political culture into one grounded entirely on logical incompatibility. The prime minister is staking his career on a plan which does not exist, for a solution which would not work, on the basis of an argument which cannot be sensibly formulated.
Look at the structure of the two documents this week. The first was a treaty with Rwanda, which sought to address the concerns of the Supreme Court. "I did not agree with their judgement," Rishi Sunak said in his statement yesterday, "but I respect it. That is why I have spent the last three weeks working tirelessly to respond to their concerns and to guarantee Rwanda's safety in a new legally binding international treaty."
The second was a piece of legislation, the safety of Rwanda (asylum and immigration) bill. "Every decision-maker," it read, "must conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country."
This makes no sense. If the treaty made Rwanda into a safe country for asylum seekers, there'd be no need to legally prevent the courts from finding otherwise. If the government was going to force the courts to consider Rwanda a safe country, there was no need to sign a treaty doing it in actuality. The two documents published this week do not support each other. They negate each other.
Indeed, the whole process of agreeing a treaty is itself illogical, given what the legislation does. The bill authorises the government to take actions even if they're in violation of the European Convention of Human Rights, the Refugee Convention, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and indeed, in its own words "any other international law, convention or rule of international law whatsoever".
And then, having done so, it makes a big deal about the new treaty with Rwanda. But of course, no international agreement the UK signs is pertinent anymore, because its very actions show it has no respect for them. It proudly states that it will contravene its own commitments. Sunak says the only reason he didn't go further is because the Rwanda government - which, let's remember, is an oppressive African dictatorship - thought it would be morally unacceptable.
All of this is supposedly being put in place because the cost of asylum has reached astronomical levels. And that's true. The current backlog of cases stands at around 130,000 people. In 2022-2023, the cost of accommodating those waiting in hotels for their claim to be processed stood at £2.3bn. Within five years, IPPR estimates that accommodation costs will reach up to £6.3bn per year.
The blame for the backlog does not lie with boats. We receive fewer asylum applications than Germany, France or Spain, but have a much worse backlog than any of them. It started growing significantly in 2018, when just 299 people arrived in boats.
The primary reason for the backlog is policy. We stopped processing the asylum claims. The share of applications completed within six months fell from around 78% in 2015 to around seven per cent in 2021.
There is therefore a very simple solution to the problem. It is to process the asylum claims.
The Rwanda policy, on the other hand, does not provide a solution, even if it could be made to operate. Rwanda made a total of 487 asylum decisions in 2021. It simply does not have the capacity to scale up to UK requirements.
Figures released last night show that the UK paid Rwanda £100 million this year, on top of the £140 million we'd already paid and an extra £50 million agreed for next year. That's nearly £300 million for zero asylum seekers to be sent to the country, all to pursue a policy which distracts us from the only thing which would actually work.
Rwanda does not save money. It costs money.
But all of this pales in comparison to the real lunacy of the bill. It's the first time in our lifetime, and quite possibly in British legal history, that a government has legislated for people's perception of reality.
This is the key characteristic of the legislation. It does not operate on reality. It operates on perception. It prevents courts, ministers or immigration officers from stating that Rwanda is not a safe country.
On the specific basis of Rwanda, that is obviously obscene. We know that Rwanda is not a safe country, because the Supreme Court said it wasn't, back when it was free to come to independent judgements about the world on the basis of evidence. It does not have an independent judiciary. There is no asylum appeal process. Applicants from war torn states like Afghanistan are routinely rejected.
We also know it isn't safe from international human rights reports. Government opponents disappear or suffer suspicious deaths. Arbitrary detention, ill-treatment, and torture are commonplace. Even British police, if indeed they're still legally allowed to come to such judgements, do not think it's safe. They've previously had to warn Rwandans in the UK that the dictatorship has sent hitmen to kill them on our own territory.
But quite apart from the morality, we have clearly crossed a threshold here. You could apply this to anything. You could legislate to force judges to consider the sky purple, or for Rishi Sunak's trousers to be the right length, or for Europe to be moved to New Zealand, or for sausages to be made of pillows. You could legislate for cheese to smell like fish or for bald men to have hair. There's really no end to the possibilities, other than the outer reaches of the human imagination. Because that's where this bill operates.
It is not just unmoored from empirical reality. It is a denial of empirical reality. It is, in effect, a declaration of war against empirical reality.
The word Orwellian is overused. But part of the reason we try to limit its use is so we can deploy it when it truly fits. And by God it fits today: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
There'll be a lot of talk over the next few months of Commons votes and Lords votes and Strasbourg court cases and the like. But one of the central tasks we will all face, as individuals, is to stay sane in a political culture which has gone completely mad. We have to somehow maintain our inner commitment to reason when the world around us demands that we forsake it.
We're all Winston Smith now, in O'Brien's torture chamber. We better hope it works out better for us than it did for him.
Odds and sods: Important announcement
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In exchange for your kind subscription, I am going to give you fuck all - other than the sense of inner peace provided by supporting independent journalism.
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I know exactly the financial level I need to hit if I'm going to make this thing viable - it's the money I lost from quitting one podcast and one weekly column in order to do it. As long as I hit that level, I can keep this running permanently. I'm pretty confident I can do so. The pledges are currently around two-thirds of where I need to be and ticking ever upwards.
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Whenever one of those emails comes in telling me someone signed up, it's an extraordinary validation of my work. But it's also a validation of a way of funding journalism - one which makes sure content can be free, through the support of those willing to go the extra mile.
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And this week of all weeks, that seems a decent thing to stand for.
I’m looking forward to the first legal challenge on behalf of the first detainee, as it inevitably wends its way through the High Court to the Supreme Court, where the judges will apply the proper tests as to whether any legislation can simply disapply tenets of international law or treaty obligations (aside from those in another explicit jurisdiction such as ECHR), and can direct the government that, whilst it is free to declare an official opinion and append it to a law, it is utterly unable to bend reality to its will, such that the question of a person’s safety will be assessed on the basis of material facts - “notwithstanding” any assertions of safety in a statute. The government cannot tell the courts to disregard facts.
I’ve seen self-defeating acts before, but this might be the first act of self-devouring.
It is stupid, arbitrary, will hurt and you end up eating yourself and your own shit until you die as a result.
Utter, utter nutters - attempting to appease the headbangers is arguably more moronic than being one, as at least you have the option not to.
God, we needed an election after Johnson, urgently after Truss and now it’s verging on the palliative.
Please, please make it stop.