I wasn’t going to write about the UK government’s ‘solution’ to illegal immigration because in the big scheme of things, it didn’t seem to stand out head and shoulders above the hundreds of other colossally stupid and evil things the government has been doing over the last four years.
But then I read an article which seemed to me to be an undisguised attempt to give the government’s Rwanda policy the imprimatur of legal authority. It made me laugh, not because the writer was trying to be funny – he took himself very seriously and fully expected his readers to reciprocate – but because the thick foliage of lawyerly erudition had hidden from his view a large elephant in the Rwandan jungle. What made it even funnier was that it emanated from the fake freedom movement, or what I call the My Freedom Movement. So, it occurred to me that this blinkered view could be more prevalent than I had imagined.
But first a brief recap of the Rwandan saga and the latest development, about which our serious legal beagle is extremely unhappy.
The government’s ‘solution’ to the increasing number of asylum seekers landing on Blighty’s shores is to acquire, possibly even arrogate, the right, contrary to human rights law, to send them to the last place an asylum seeker would want to go; the kind of place they are running away from. The government wants to unceremoniously dump them in Rwanda with as little fuss as possible. And because the lackeys in cabinet, who serve the Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital (OCGFC), know that this scheme is unlikely to result in a significant number of asylum seekers being removed from the UK, it’s being sold as a deterrent. The government appears to want asylum seekers all over the world to understand that the small boats they plan to board to get to Britain will only facilitate a stopover en route to Rwanda. Of course they don’t really believe the deterrent nonsense they’re pedalling.
In November 2023, the UK’s Supreme Court declared the policy unlawful because Rwanda was not a safe country to which asylum seekers could be removed. The basis for the judgement is that Rwanda has form in making unfair asylum decisions, resulting in asylum seekers being returned to face the very threats they fled in the first place. Rwanda itself is not exactly a human rights beacon, but then neither is the UK anymore. Furthermore, the agreement that the UK signed with Rwanda stipulated that once a person is relocated to Rwanda, they would be ineligible to return to the UK, but could be returned to their country of origin if their asylum claim were refused. The Supreme Court ruled that this made Rwanda unsafe for asylum seekers by invoking the international human rights law principle known as non-refoulement. This principle forbids a country receiving asylum seekers from returning them to a country in which they would be in probable danger of persecution.
Perhaps many of you reading this don’t care about asylum seekers’ human rights or the morality that underwrites them. If so, please humour me for one or two paragraphs while I bore you with my perspective, from which I can see an obvious moral dilemma. I want to try to say something about the ethos behind granting asylum and then recognise that we are being manipulated by our OCGFC lackeys into trashing not just that ethos, but human rights more generally, as they pretend to control ‘uncontrolled’ immigration. How do we balance that so as not to end up doing exactly what they want us to do: fight each other while they make out like bandits.
A person arrives on our shores claiming that their life is in danger in the place from which they’ve just escaped. Should we care? I don’t think the natural impulse to flee persecution requires explanation or justification to most of the readers of this blog. At the height of covid tyranny with its lockdowns, forced ritual masking and coerced vaccination, possibly for the first time in human history, a sane minority everywhere in the world found themselves held hostage by a dangerous cult. We’re used to thinking of cults as strange little islands of madness offering themselves up for dispassionate and curious observation by a relatively sane majority.
The only cult you’re a member of is the one you don’t know you’re in. Cult members are unconscious; cult leaders know what they’re doing. And, under normal circumstances, when a cult member realises that they are indeed in a dangerous cult, they can flee to the safety of the majority, where they will be welcomed back and given protection. But this time, the cult members vastly outnumbered the sane. That was true everywhere. There was no escape. We had to secretly band together and hope for the best. Many in the freedom movement came face to face with an evil they did not know existed, and many consequently found God. We fantasised about seeking asylum in a safe place where everyone was sane. But everywhere we looked lay madness.
If we do care, even just a little bit, about the plight of an asylum seeker, do we have the wherewithal to find out if there are real grounds for their claim. In other words, should we process an application for asylum, and then give them shelter until the danger has passed? Or do we say, “Tough luck, not our problem, go to Rwanda.” Perhaps as the Western world itself becomes economically, spiritually and morally poorer, the less relevant this moral dilemma becomes for the average citizen.
I’m a big fan of human rights insofar as they bolster the basic tenets of natural law. An end to both human rights and natural law is a sure way to hasten our enslavement. The spectre of uncontrolled immigration offers our overlords a problem-reaction-solution bonanza. It foments unrest and division that they can exploit and, while pretending to solve it with hairbrained schemes like Jog On to Rwanda, they can claim that their hands are tied by those pesky things called human rights. So, pretty soon, anti-immigrant sentiment could fuel a clamour to ditch the entire human rights infrastructure inherited from the EU. Is that a package containing all your human rights I see getting flushed down the toilet? Job done.
I’ve made my position on uncontrolled immigration clear but I also want to make it equally clear that controlling immigration and treating human beings with decency and fairness are not mutually exclusive positions. I get the fact that the English Channel was once an impenetrable moat, but now small boats carrying human cargo from places our government has had an active hand in ruining are being escorted across it. But that isn’t going to make me a cheerleader for the idiotic Hotel Rwanda sham because, as we shall see, that scheme is designed to complement the madness and then some. It’s only made me more disgusted with it than I could ever have been.
A couple of things stuck out for me while watching Neil Oliver in conversation with Tucker Carlson on this and other topics. One was that it was pretty clear to me who the Richard-head in that room was, and it wasn’t Neil Oliver. The other thing that stuck out was Oliver rightly pointing out that the migrants (or certainly the vast majority of them) are pawns in this game. I believe you retain your humanity by acknowledging that. You don’t have to dehumanise migrants in order to question uncontrolled immigration. That’s a trap you shouldn’t fall into because you’ll also be far more likely to surrender your own human rights if you deny others theirs.
In its ruling, the Supreme Court took the view that the Rwandan government does not understand international asylum law. The inadequacy of Rwanda’s asylum system was supported by evidence presented to the Supreme Court by the UN Refugee Agency (the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR). The Supreme Court referred to a similar arrangement Rwanda has with Israel – that beacon of international human rights with minor stains on its record for ethnic cleansing, rampant apartheid and now genocide – to illustrate Rwanda’s scant concern for refoulement.
Helping Western countries remove their human detritus is in fact part of the Rwandan government’s business model. Apart from Israel, the EU funded a scheme to move refugees from Libya to Rwanda, and Denmark also finds it easy to turn a blind eye to Rwanda’s unsavoury human rights record in doing dirty deals to solve its migrant problem.
So, what was the government’s response to the Supreme Court’s pedantic insistence that human rights matter when trying to flush migrants down the toilet? It passed a bill – The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024 – that declared Rwanda to be a safe place, despite the evidence the Supreme Court drew on to come to the conclusion that it wasn’t. That chess move could well have been lifted from a Yes Minister script:
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Minister, I have some bad news for you. The highest court in the land has declared your policy illegal.
Minister Jim Hacker: Well, we’ll just have to legalise the illegal policy by passing a law to…make it legal! Isn’t that what laws are for – making things legal?!
At this juncture, I shall take my tongue out of my cheek in the interests of being a little more fair and transparent about the government’s move. On the one hand, it was patently absurd to respond to the Supreme Court ruling by passing a bill that simply declares Rwanda to be safe regardless of whether it’s true or not. But on the other hand, our ministers aren’t that stupid. The government did produce a fig leaf in the form of a new treaty that purports to address the risk of refoulement for asylum seekers by stating that a relocated individual cannot be moved to any country, except the UK. Which means that, contrary to the UK government’s stated aim of ridding itself of asylum seekers, we could see asylum seekers bouncing back and forth between Rwanda and the UK. Maybe our ministers are that stupid after all? No, I’m afraid they’re not. I wish they were. The more likely scenario is that the Rwandan government will simply not honour the treaty it signs, which is the whole point of choosing Rwanda in the first place – if you’re going to do something dodgy, it doesn’t make sense to partner with someone who intends to play by the book. What’s more, the UK government’s new bill conveniently prevents this from being tested in UK courts again anyway.
In December 2023, the UK director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) summed up the human rights situation in Rwanda:
“Serious human rights abuses continue to occur in Rwanda, including repression of free speech, arbitrary detention, ill-treatment, and torture by Rwandan authorities. Political space in Rwanda remains tightly closed and the opposition face routine threats and harassment. The reality of conditions in Rwanda calls into question and severely undermines the government’s assessment of it as a safe country for asylum seekers and refugees to be sent to, as set out in its country policy and information notes, equality impact assessment, Safety of Rwanda Bill, and its policy statement.”
The HRW UK Director made this assessment in response to a request from a UK government International Agreements Committee that was looking into the Rwanda agreement. The HRW Director is of the view that the general human rights situation in Rwanda has a direct bearing on the risk of refoulement because it determines the extent to which people are able to speak freely and raise concerns with a monitoring committee established under the agreement with Rwanda and which may have to refer complaints for resolution to Rwandan Government institutions.
All things considered, the fictitious Yes Minister analogy for this sordid affair is, in my humble opinion, spot on. Rwanda is a country that jails people for “spreading false information or harmful propaganda with intent to cause a hostile international opinion against [the] Rwandan Government.” In 2018, Rwandan security forces opened fire on refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo who were protesting a cut in food rations, killing 12 of them. Human rights groups concluded that excessive force was used. These are just a few examples from a litany of abuses listed in the HRW submission, painting a picture of a government that embraces ruthless repression of any dissent that threatens its position.
If that is the kind of country we choose to partner with while ostensibly seeking to meet our international obligations on human rights, then we are in the same league. This arrangement is not the same as trading with another nation for vital goods or services. The UK government has decided that asylum seekers are human garbage and the best place to dump them is with another country that not only thinks the same way but is also not constrained, as we still are, by its institutions.
Sir Humphrey wants his day in court
The latest development in the saga takes the shape of a legal challenge to the government’s scheme by the UK government senior civil servants’ union, the FDA union. The Safety of Rwanda bill grants ministers the discretion to ignore international human rights law, specifically Rule 39 orders from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that can potentially prevent the deportation of an asylum seeker, pending a final decision by the court.
The FDA union’s position is that being ordered by ministers to breach international law would force them to break the Civil Service Code to “uphold the rule of law and administration of justice”.
Here’s how the union explained the tightrope it’s walking in navigating its duty to implement government policy without fear or favour while also refusing to blindly follow orders that are fundamentally wrong:
“Civil servants know that they have to support the government of the day and implement policy, regardless of their political beliefs, but they also know they have a legal obligation to adhere to the Civil Service Code. Faced with a government that is prepared to act in this reckless way, it is left to the FDA to defend our members and the integrity of the civil service.”
So, where do I stand? Do I think civil servants are doing the right thing on this occasion? Yes! Do I think they are a bunch of politically motivated hypocrites acting in their own interests? An even bigger yes! Were civil servants in the slightest bit concerned when the Department of Digital Culture, Media and Sport’s (DCMS) Counter Disinformation Cell[i] was running an Orwellian extrajudicial operation to remove lawful content from social media platforms? No. Because they hated anti-vaxxers and opted to side with a regime that was operating in the same way that the Rwandan government operates. Did senior civil servants come to the defence of their junior colleagues in the NHS when they were resisting the government’s threat to mandate Big Pharma’s experimental concoction for NHS staff? No, they didn’t. But now, after four years of ‘just following orders’, they’ve found their spines and stiffened them with ‘integrity’. Yeah, right.
The elephant in the Rwandan jungle
Although there must be some voices in the alt media space who can see the Rwandan asylum seeker scheme for what it really is, I haven’t yet seen it articulated. The fake freedom movement, which purportedly eschews blind order-following, is awash with righteous indignation that government employees are not blindly following patently stupid orders. Because that’s what the fake freedom movement is all about – discouraging blind obedience…until it’s time to blindly follow orders. Legal professors have been commissioned by the Daily Telegraph’s flunkey, The Daily Sceptic, to ask very serious questions regarding the civil servants’ quandary about their infernal Civil Service Code that apparently forces them to comply with the law. Profound questions like: “what does ‘complying with the law’ mean?”. And, even more profoundly:
“which law should civil servants comply with, if laws conflict with one another? Should it be international law, as the FDA asserts? Or should it be our domestic statute law, which in the form of the Safety of Rwanda Act 2024 is quite clear about the effect and import of ‘rule 39’ measures?”
Indeed! If national law B has been passed to circumvent international law A, why can’t our bureaucrats honour their oath to King and country and put all their bloody eggs in the national law basket? What is wrong with these people? It must have something to do with “the growth in the recalcitrance, independence and power of the civil service in the UK”. How dare they? How very dare they? Our supposedly freedom conscious legal beagle works himself up into such a lather over the temerity of the power-hungry government bureaucrats invoking international law for political ends that he finds himself scoffing at the idea of human rights transcending the concerns of the nation state. Personally I think human rights embodying natural law should transcend everything. They should be sacrosanct. We could test that out with our legal beagle by asking him what he would say if an international law defending bodily autonomy rode through our national gates on a white horse to rescue us from a national law mandating Big Pharma’s ‘vaccines’. Would he tell it to get lost and send it packing on the Eurotunnel, or would he greet it warmly in the language of whatever country it hailed from? I know what I would do.
All I could hear was a whoopee cushion as he pondered whether the effort to stymie the government’s attempted disposal of bothersome asylum seekers using the handy services of dictatorships “might very well be influenced by the kind of managerialist and internationalist preferences which are now so clearly dominant in the social classes within which judges are nowadays mostly situated”. Invoking social class! Quite so!
I wonder…was this the same fake freedom movement that only three years ago was bemoaning the civil service’s failure to find the courage to rebel against the government’s totalitarian covid diktat?
In any event, did the law professor mention, even in passing, the elephant in the jungle; the gorilla on the basketball court? No. It pains me to have to tell you, dear reader, that oddly enough, if you want the elephant in the room exposed, you have to turn to the wicked mainstream media. Both sides of the uniparty media political spectrum have spotted it and reported it. The first 300 deportations to Rwanda are going to cost the taxpayer (you, me and the erudite lawyer who is keen for the scheme not to be hindered by internationalist bureaucrats) £541 million. Which works out to £1.8 million per asylum seeker. Even more stunning is the fact that £240 million has already been forked out and not a single asylum seeker has been deported. Because, as everyone knows, it is standard commercial practice to pay for a service long before you get it, and long before you have satisfied yourself that the service is even legal.
Adding to the strangeness of it all is the fact that £490 million is earmarked specifically for an “economic transformation and integration fund (ETIF), which is designed to support economic growth in Rwanda”. What in the blue blazes has supporting Rwanda’s economic growth got to do with processing asylum applications? In fact, the whole agreement with Rwanda is called the Migration and Economic Development Partnership. Going by the name alone, you’d be hard pressed to make a link to the actual service Rwanda is supplying – providing a waste disposal service for unwanted migrants.
If you want to put aside sentimental concerns about the law and human rights, you could ruthlessly ask: how much bang are you likely to get for your buck? According to the Deputy PM and the Home Office’s own modelling, around 300 migrants per year could be sent to Rwanda. Combining the projected rate of arrivals and the projected rate of removals, The Migration Observatory reckons that the probability of a person crossing the Channel in a small boat being sent to Rwanda would be around 1–2%.
And let’s not get distracted by the £5.4 billion taxpayer bill for migrant hotels and other asylum support which has propelled a certain property management magnate into the Sunday Times Rich List. Let’s just stay focused for now on the paltry £0.54 billion finding its way into the Rwandan government coffers.
Returning to our fake freedom movement; rather than figuring out whether it’s a prudent use of taxpayer money to pay a dictatorship in Rwanda £541 million to deport 300 asylum seekers, perspicacious law professors prefer to whinge about how civil servants are blocking the efficient shipping of vaults of taxpayer money to a dictatorship in Rwanda.
Having watched the global criminocracy in operation over the last four years pulling off one wealth transfer scam after another, I am fully signed up to John Titus’ maxim on following the money: money isn’t just a way of keeping score; it is the score. So, with that as our guiding principle, let’s recap on the Rwanda scheme:
· A minimum of £541 million of UK taxpayer money is being transferred to a country that couldn’t spell ‘transparency’ or ‘human rights’ if you gave it a dictionary.
· And for that money, you might wave goodbye to 300 migrants per year.
· £240 million has already been paid and no migrants have been put on a plane. If the civil servants succeed in challenging the government’s scheme, and if the planes to carry the migrants never take off, I think it’s a safe bet that our money-for-nothing chums in Rwanda won’t be terribly keen on clicking the refund button. And I very much doubt if our ‘clever’ ministers have inserted one in the contract.
· £490 million looks like a bribe to support Rwanda’s economic growth. Throwing money at Rwanda to support its economic growth is essential to us here because the UK’s economy is exploding with such vitality that it needs a valve to prevent it from bursting at the seams. The growing number of UK citizens who rely on foodbanks to stay alive will back me up on that.
Will the thought police arrest me if I engage in a wild thought experiment about whether that Rwandan dosh will actually remain in Rwanda or whether a slice of it will mysteriously find its way into the pockets of, I don’t know, someone known to us here in the UK? Crazed speculation. The gin-addled ramblings of a conspiracy theorist.
Apropos of nothing, Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s covid dictator up until February 2023, will receive a $20 million ‘grant’ from Melinda Gates. Needless to say, it’s all above board because the global oligarchy is ethical and honest to a fault. It couldn’t possibly have anything whatsoever to do with a golden handshake from the Gates vaccine money-making machine for being one of the West’s most ruthless covid tyrants. The payment is in fact part of a $1 billion grant to organisations supporting women and girls around the world, and no-one doubts that Ardern cares deeply about women and girls and that every penny of that money will be used to make some women much happier.
Absolutely nothing dodgy to see here then. So let me reiterate the key takeaway of this rant. The only way to stop small boats from arriving is to squirt hundreds of millions of pounds in the general direction of Rwanda and ‘support its economic growth’. Makes perfect sense. Why didn’t I think of it? It would be such a shame if those naughty civil servants succeeded in trying to put a spanner in the works of the government’s most earnest and principled attempts to get a grip on uncontrolled immigration by writing a cheque for £541 million made out to ‘Rwanda…and Company’.
As the OCGFC switch from team Blue to team Red in the UK, it isn’t going to make a jot of difference. Half of the money is gone. Hotel Rwanda has served its purpose and it’s now team Red’s turn to find new ways to fleece us. Ways that will no doubt infuriate our legal beagle because they’ll not have been thought up by the Blue team.
[i] https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/The-State-of-Free-Speech-Online.pdf - page 106 and 107.
“Human rights… should transcend everything.” Agreed!
Thank you for an excellent expose on the My Freedom Movement, who, I’ve noticed, are increasingly identifying openly as right wing or conservative, hence their hatred of the public / civil service.
Here in Australia they also all too readily jump to racist scapegoating ‘solutions’, rather than pointing to bipartisan government policies that caused economic and political dislocation in the first place.
Western supremacy is strong in the My Freedom Movement, with a dash of white supremacy on the fringes
(which of course was to be expected when the so-called left ditched human rights over Covid).
As usual, the well-earned sarcasm is pitch-perfect.
Great job of pointing out the FDA / civil servants' hypocrisy.
Worth repeating: “...if you’re going to do something dodgy, it doesn’t make sense to partner with someone who intends to play by the book.”