For years Britain has dumped its household and commercial waste in poor African countries.
Now we have decided to dump our asylum seekers there too.
According to Boris Johnson, Britain’s compassion is infinite but our capacity to help is limited.
The one thing which has absolutely no limits is the cynicism of this Tory government.
The decision to deport people seeking sanctuary in this country to Rwanda is a policy that has been dredged from the sewers of political muckraking.
It stinks of a Prime Minister desperate to move the attention away from his lawbreaking partying by deliberately stirring up a controversy over immigration.
He knows that it will play to people’s crudest prejudices just as he knows that Labour will be obliged to vote against the plan, not because they are weak on migration, but because this plan is untested, inhumane and a waste of public money.
The Tories will have already ordered posters from the printers claiming Keir Starmer voted to keep our borders open.
This Government apparently doesn’t care that Rwanda has a terrible human rights record whose government, according to Human Rights Watch, has presided over the “arbitrary detention, ill-treatment and detention” of political opponents.
Nor does it appear to have considered the optics of encouraging white, Christian refugees from Ukraine to come to this country while closing the door to Muslims fleeing from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.
The threat of deportation to Rwanda will not stop desperate people from risking their lives by crossing the Channel, nor will it deter the people traffickers.
This was never about helping those in desperate need. It was about helping the Tories out of a hole.
