Britain racist?! Oh poppycock, come off it dear boy, we have brown faces in our Downing Street cabinet.
Britain sent its Home Secretary James Cleverly to Rwanda this week to announce a treaty with the East African country on receiving asylum seekers from British soil.
Notably, the British envoy was not the Foreign Secretary David Cameron.
The bilateral arrangement – known as the Rwanda Scheme – is a classic British ploy. It overturns norms of international law governing asylum setting Britain apart from other supposedly developed nations.
If the deal is implemented – and it still not clear if the policy will survive legal challenges – Britain is proposing to fly illegal migrants to Rwanda where their case for asylum application will be processed. By convention, asylum seekers are normally granted temporary residence in the country they are applying to.
The British Conservative government is proposing to subcontract its asylum process to Rwanda for a fee worth millions of pounds.
If it sounds grubby, sordid and bizarre that’s because it is. But it gets even worse.
Last month, the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court ruled that the government’s Rwanda Scheme was unlawful. The scheme has been delayed for nearly two years by legal challenges brought under British law and the European Convention on Human Rights.
The Supreme Court upheld arguments that Rwanda was not a safe country. After all, only 30 years ago, the country was plunged into a genocidal civil war.
Now British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is forcing through a new law that effectively ignores Britain’s highest court. The treaty signed this week with Rwanda asserts that the African nation is a safe destination in contravention of the Supreme Court ruling.
You could hardly make up how absurd this issue is. Britain’s international reputation is being trashed over a draconian scheme to dump asylum seekers in Africa. Hardline anti-immigration Conservatives want Sunak to go even harder and to rescind Britain’s membership of the ECHR.
By contrast, a large number of parliamentarians in the government party are threatening to resign if that happens, fearing the damage to Britain’s international standing.
Next year, Britain holds a general election and the Conservatives (Tories) are desperate to settle their ill-thought-out Rwanda Scheme.
Sunak has vowed to “stop the boats” carrying illegal migrants from the European mainland to Britain across the English Channel. If he doesn’t succeed in pushing through the Rwanda plan then Tory voters will take revenge at the polls.
Such is the desperation in Downing Street that the government is pushing ahead with a reckless policy that threatens to bring about its own collapse from internal divisions. Already a minister has resigned this week because he felt that Sunak was being too soft.
The absurd thing is the Conservatives have created a millstone for their neck.
The party has sought to inflame public fears about illegal immigration into the United Kingdom as a way to whip up votes. But polls show that the majority of Britons do not view irregular immigration as a crisis. The issue has been made into a crisis by Britain’s dominant rightwing news media.
Compared with other major European countries, including Germany, France, Spain and Italy, Britain has much lower numbers of people immigrating. London is making a mountain out of molehill over migration, and the accusation is that the issue is politically inflamed to incite xenophobia and racism as a way to wins votes.
Admittedly, there is a distressing problem of small boats arriving illegally on English shores from France over the past five years. Last year, the number of people arriving was put at 45,000. But the problem has been exacerbated by Britain leaving the European Union. After Brexit, London has lost negotiating leverage with its EU neighbors to redress illegal movement in a rational way.
As with the rest of Europe, higher numbers of foreign migration from North Africa and the Middle East are undoubtedly caused by wars and conflicts that the United States-led NATO military alliance has sponsored in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Mali, Niger and Syria over the past two decades.
It is these Western neocolonial depredations that form the main cause of mass displacement of populations in Africa and the Middle East.
Most of the people coming in boats across the English Channel are from Iran, Albania, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. The latter three account for the majority of migrants. Britain and the United States destroyed Iraq and Afghanistan with illegal wars over two decades.
In Syria, Britain covertly sponsored a proxy war for regime change along with the United States and other NATO members. The regime-change plot was defeated by Russia’s military intervention to support the government in Damascus.
Nevertheless, the decade-long conflict created millions of refugees who make their way to Europe, and Britain in particular.
The Rwanda Scheme is a dirty British maneuver to scapegoat asylum seekers for Britain’s legacy of illegal wars and neocolonial crimes.
Moreover, the dirty work is conveniently being carried out by British ministers who have brown faces. James Cleverly is of African descent, while Sunak was born in England from Indian parents. Other senior government figures associated with the Rwanda Scheme are former Home Ministers Priti Patel and Suella Braverman.
The parents of Sunak, Patel and Braverman were all Indian who like millions of other Indian nationals served as administrative workers in British former colonies in East Africa.
The parents of these Asian-British politicians migrated to Britain in the 1960s. How bitterly ironic that these same politicians who benefited from migration are now at the forefront of slamming the door on others today and trying to shunt them off to East Africa.
That would explain why the toffee-nosed Englishman Lord David Cameron was not sent to Rwanda this week to sign the grubby deal. One would have thought as Foreign Minister, Cameron would have been the most relevant official to conduct such bilateral overseas business.
But the ever-so-sneaky British establishment knows only too well that the optics would have looked downright shabby and colonialist, even racist. No better therefore than to send a brown face to do the unsavoury business, as with the other senior figures in London who have been pushing the policy of exiling unwanted foreigners to Africa.
I say, what!? Britain racist?! Oh poppycock, come off it dear boy, we have brown faces in our Downing Street cabinet.
Classic British dissembling and duplicity.
By Finian Cunningham
Published by SCF
Republished by The 21st Century
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.com.